"Negation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... States about which they so glibly generalized would have had no show of organized governments. The premises of their argument were obtained by the violation of its conclusion; they inferred from what was a negation of their inference, and deduced from what was a death-blow to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... She showed none of the embarrassed evasion peculiar to the woman on whom such requisitions are made but at infrequent intervals; she employed the decisive, business-like tone of a woman of whom such requests are made daily. Jane seemed to see negation coldly crystallizing before her eyes, and she gave a mortified groan to find herself drawn so near to the brink of humiliation. She had never begged before, and she registered an inward vow ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... into a rage, always with passion, and who was dear to her just because he resembled her hardly at all. But both of them were in accord as to a mute resolve not to look into the future: the girl through the carelessness of the resigned rivulet that sings on its way—the other through that exalted negation which plunges into the gulf of the present and never desires ...
— Pierre and Luce • Romain Rolland
... what I meant to tell you on another subject. If he was displeased, (and it was expressed by a shadow a mere negation of pleasure) it was not with you as a visitor and my friend. You must not fancy such a thing. It was a sort of instinctive indisposition towards seeing you here—unexplained to himself, I have no doubt—of course unexplained, or he would have desired me to receive you never again, that ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... to that tough bunch that there is no possible advance in learning through a combination of Astronomy, Medicine, and Psychology, he'll make it on that basis. It's just as important to close a door as it is to open one, you know. But it's one rough deal to prove negation. Maybe we'll have James the Holden on our hands for another semester. Martha will ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living." This was a direct assault upon the Sadducean doctrine of negation concerning the literal resurrection of the dead. The Sadducees were distinctively the zealous upholders of the law, wherein Jehovah affirms Himself to be the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob;[1117] yet they denied the possible resurrection of these patriarchs, and made the ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... circumstance, whose waters ebb and flow with perfect balance, lies the aboriginal abyss of real Being. Essence, or God, is not a relation or a part, but the whole. Being is the vast affirmative, excluding negation, self-balanced, and swallowing up all relations, parts and times within itself. Nature, truth, virtue, are the influx from thence. Vice is the absence or departure of the same. Nothing, Falsehood, may indeed stand as the great Night or shade on which as a background the living universe ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... forced to admit that the girl still had power to trouble him. At times his strained nerves would relax to no other device than the picturing of her as his own. Exactly in the measure that he indulged this would his pride smart. With a budding gift for negation he could imagine her caring for nothing but his money; and there was that other picture, swift and awful, a pantomime in shadow, with the ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... The fact is that originality (unless in minds of very unusual force) is by no means a matter, as some suppose, of impulse or intuition. In general, to be found, it must be elaborately sought and, although a positive merit of the highest class, demands in its attainment less of invention than negation. ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... Apostle of Negation expressed, once upon a day, a regret that he had not been consulted when the Universe was being planned, otherwise he would have arranged to make good things ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... (outsider), and the latter a Batini, an insider. Moses is quoted because he ignored future rewards and punishments. As regards the "two Eternities," Persian and Arab metaphysicians split Eternity, i.e., the negation of Time, into two halves, Azal (beginninglessness) and Abad (endlessness); both being mere words, gatherings of letters with a subjective significance. In English we use "Eternal" (Aeviternus, age-long, life-long) as loosely, by applying it to three distinct ideas; ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... infinite, not infinite after its kind: for, of a thing infinite only after its kind, infinite attributes may be denied; but that which is absolutely infinite, contains in its essence whatever expresses reality, and involves no negation. ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... me the kindest farewell and I left her serene in the negation of all beauty, all hope save that of a world run on the lines of a model municipality, disease a memory, sewerage, light and air systems perfected, the charted brain sending its costless messages to the outer ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... relations between them were precisely similar in regard to nearly everything they ever discussed. And yet they would be called, and were, a perfectly happy couple. Perfectly? Was every happy married couple just what they were? Was married happiness, then, merely the negation of violent unhappiness? Merely not beating your wife, and your wife not drinking or running up debts? He thought: "No, no, there's something more in it than that." And then his forehead wrinkled up in his characteristic habit and he thought: "Of course, it's my fault. ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... did not answer at once; she seemed to be trying to divine his meaning. Then she waved her hand—a curious movement, which he took to be a gesture of negation—her broadening smile disclosing teeth that were ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... irritating. Instead of the aid they had counted on, they found but a cold neutrality. In place of the sympathy on which they reckoned, they saw, now that they looked coolly across the Channel, a reserve passing into disapproval. The pen of Burke was denouncing the Revolution as the very negation of those principles on which English liberty rested. The priests and nobles who had fled from the new France were finding pity and welcome on English shores. And now that France flung herself on an armed Europe to win freedom for its peoples from their ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... is given by the little passage I have quoted from one of her books. It was the one thing positive which I found in my lady's religion; all the rest was to me a beautiful, intricate, purely artificial negation of human ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... state of war, no doubt, predisposed many to assent to such theses who a few years before would have remembered that this was but the nominal position of the average protectionist of the three preceding generations. War being in itself the negation of Free Trade, the inevitable restrictions and the war temper alike prepared many to find reasons for continuing a restrictive policy when the war was over. When, therefore, the Committee of Lord Balfour of Burleigh published its report, ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... and leave an Impression in the Imagination: Others are the names of the Imaginations themselves; that is to say, of those Ideas, or mentall Images we have of all things wee see, or remember: And others againe are names of Names; or of different sorts of Speech: As Universall, Plurall, Singular, Negation, True, False, Syllogisme, Interrogation, Promise, Covenant, are the names of certain Forms of Speech. Others serve to shew the Consequence, or Repugnance of one name to another; as when one saith, "A Man is a Body," hee intendeth that the name of Body is necessarily ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... hand, palm down, makes movement of affirmation up and down; (b) to deny: hand, palm down, makes movement of negation ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... hands above his head in shocked negation of this injustice—but there came from the street the thin wail of a trumpet; another joined it, and a third; the three sounds executed a triple convolution and died away one by one. Holding his thin hand out for silence ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... is the most nakedly iniquitous. Tyrants have often substituted their own will for the ordered procedure of a tribunal, but no tyrant before ever went through the atrocious farce of deliberately making a tribunal the organised negation of security for justice. Couthon laid its theoretic base in a fallacy that must always be full of seduction to shallow persons in authority: 'He who would subordinate the public safety to the inventions of jurisconsults, to the formulas of the Court, is either an imbecile ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... Mother alike had gradually, without violence, found themselves shut outside all Protestant communions, and at last they met only with a few extreme Calvinists like themselves, on terms of what may almost be called negation—with no priest, no ritual, no festivals, no ornament of any kind, nothing but the Lord's Supper and the exposition of Holy Scripture drawing these austere spirits into any sort of cohesion. They called themselves 'the Brethren', simply; a title enlarged by the ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... AS Egos towards each other. LOVE cannot be felt towards others AS others. Love is the expression of individual suitability and preference, its positive existence in some cases implies its absolute negation in others. Hence Love can never be the essential and root of social feeling, and hence the necessity for the instinct of abstract justice which takes no account of preferences or aversions. And here I may say that all application of the word LOVE to unknown, ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... she had ever done, she told the story we have heard. There, revealed, was the defect of a life, a problem to be worked out by the analytic student of mankind. Was it to introduce a little saving recklessness, the redeeming truth of honesty and justice to self, or the neutralizing of self-negation by the acceptance of merited worth! Even through our weaknesses are we sometimes healed. If any reason existed which could merit one self-accusing thought, the doctor found it when he uncovered the resentment which had never ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... the question is one of the construction, not of the verification, of facts; of prophecy for the future, rather than of bare affirmation or negation. No one can presume to determine such a question without a knowledge of how human beings have been accustomed to act under similar circumstances. Illumination of that sort Irish history and the contemporary Irish problem incontestably need. The modern case for the Union rests mainly ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... not determined by a point without it, and then it must flow back again on itself, that is, there arises a cyclical line, which does enclose a space. If the straight line be assumed as the positive, the cyclical is then the negation of the straight. It is a line, which at no point strikes out into the straight, but changes its direction continuously. But if the primary line be conceived as undetermined, and the straight line as determined throughout, then the cyclical ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... silent, weighing this suggestion. They both broke into negation at once as they reached their ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... aim was to serve religion and monarchy. But even the works of those who confessed such principles were not in harmony with themselves. One can say that it pleased the authors to understand their activity in that way, but the reading masses could understand it and often understood it as a negation ...
— So Runs the World • Henryk Sienkiewicz,
... dim than the man's blindness, the glory which burst upon him when, as the restoring clay left his eyes, the light of the world invaded his astonished soul? The very idea may well make one tremble. Blackness of darkness—not an invading stranger, but the home-companion always there—the negation never understood because the assertion was unknown—creation not erased and treasured in the memory, but to his eyes uncreated!—Blackness of darkness!.... The glory of the celestial blue! The towers of the great Jerusalem dwelling in the awful space! The room! The life! The tenfold-glorified ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... Bacon and Pascal, to the less noble character of the scenes around him in his youth; and admit that, though it was necessary for his special work that he should be put, as it were, on a level with his race, on those plains of Stratford, we should see in this a proof, instead of a negation, of the mountain power over human intellect. For breadth and perfectness of condescending sight, the Shakesperian mind stands alone; but in ascending sight it is limited. The breadth of grasp is innate; the stoop and slightness of it was given by the circumstances of scene; and ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... his hand in negation. Then his curly head fell, and he said sadly, but decisively: "I will stay ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... proposition can determine only one place in logical space: nevertheless the whole of logical space must already be given by it. (Otherwise negation, logical sum, logical product, etc., would introduce more and more new elements in co-ordination.) (The logical scaffolding surrounding a picture determines logical space. The force of a proposition reaches through the ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein
... very State-Papers, George and his English Lords have a provoking slighting tone towards Friedrich Wilhelm; they answer his violent convictions, and thoroughgoing rapid proposals, by brief official negation, with an air of superiority,—traces of, a polite sneer perceptible, occasionally. A mere Clown of a King, thinks George; a mere gesticulating Coxcomb, thinks Friedrich Wilhelm. "MEIN BRUDER DER COMODIANT, My Brother ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... would become more than an exercise of the mind, which can be endlessly prolonged, it needs positive material. As soon as it transcends the positive and enters the region of so-called pure ideas, the dominion of the intellect, it runs into nothing, becomes a negation. The natural consequence of this dominion of the intellect, of which many now dream, is the popular doctrine: "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." To this the very wisest legislation of all nations has ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... means of exemplary virtues, he has reached the lordship of the universe. Its heaven, Nirvana, is indeed the world of infinite bliss; but, incapable of cognizing the infinite, it calls it nothing. Heaven, being the inconceivable infinite, is equivalent to pure negation. Nature, to the Buddhist, instead of being the delusive shadow of God, as the Brahman views it, is envisaged as a nexus of laws, which reward and punish impartially both ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... religious faith forget that a body thrown upward will continue to ascend for a time after it has parted from the propelling power. Atheism is in nowise responsible for human progress, for Atheism is nothing—a mere negation—and "out of nothing nothing comes." A belief in God affords man a basis upon which to build; it is an acknowledgment of authority, the chief prerequisite of order; but in Atheism there is no constructive element. While it may be no more immoral ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... obtrusive. Even those who break the laws of this science, either through ignorance or carried away by some impulse, must comprehend that it is with social intercourse as with music, a single discordant note is a complete negation of the art itself, for the harmony exists only when all its conditions are observed ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... that could not deceive his genius. Prince Bismarck has been really complimentary to the useful phantom of the autocratic might. There is an awe-inspiring idea of infinity conveyed in the word Neant—and in Russia there is no idea. She is not a Neant, she is and has been simply the negation of everything worth living for. She is not an empty void, she is a yawning chasm open between East and West; a bottomless abyss that has swallowed up every hope of mercy, every aspiration towards personal dignity, towards freedom, towards knowledge, every ennobling desire of the ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... is not a monotony, but an utterly disorderly and confusing variety that makes this grey, but Democracy, for practical purposes, does really assume such a monotony. Like 'infinity', the Democratic formula is a concrete-looking and negotiable symbol for a negation. It is the aspect in political disputes and contrivances of that social and moral deliquescence the nature and possibilities of which have been discussed in the preceding chapters ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... was an Idealist in the sense in which we apply the term to Berkeley. In fact, the cardinal defect of their speculations lies in their oversight of the considerations which lead to Idealism. If many of them regarded the material world as a negation, it was an active negation; not ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... source of Law, and holds fast by a faith in the Nemesis of Greek, Goth, and Jew. He abjures half-way houses; but is withheld by pathetic memories of the church spires and village graveyards of his youth from following his doubts to their conclusion; yet he gives way to his negation in his reference to "old Jew lights now burnt out," and in the half-despair of his expression to Froude about the Deity Himself, "He does nothing." Professor Masson says that "Carlyle had abandoned the Metaphysic of Christianity while retaining much of its ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... and negation ran up and down the long table. Dan tapped with his knife again. "You hear me," he warned. "Thirty year I've been ridin' John Cardigan's log-carriages; thirty year I've been gettin' everythin' out of a log it's possible to git out, which is more'n you fellers at the trimmers can git out of a board ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... juridical conditions, for they possess the direct denial of their real conditions in their ideal conditions, and the direct enforcement of their ideal conditions they have almost outlived in the opinion of neighbouring nations. Consequently the practical political party in Germany properly demands the negation of philosophy. Its error consists not in the demand, but in sticking to the demand, which seriously it neither does nor can enforce. It believes it can accomplish this negation by turning its back on philosophy, the while its averted head ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... of Eton; a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge; he won the Greek and Latin Odes in 1820, and the Greek Ode again in 1821. To him, therefore, the classic spirit was inborn, and a training that omitted the study of Latin and Greek the very negation of education. He would have had something very trenchant to say of what is now known as "the modern side." He wrote a very rich and splendid prose, and it is no fond family partiality that leads me to quote to you his eloquent and precious ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... world let us say, or merely in the mews to the back, has so very much too little as to have none at all, which is another way of diminishing possible enjoyment. There seems, moreover, to be a certain queer virtue in mere emptiness, in mere negation. We require a margin of nothing round everything that is to charm us; round our impressions as well as round the material objects which can supply them; for without it we lose all outline, and begin to ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... relationship she had gone to stay with Lady Considine. This had made me take everything else for granted, and the noisy American world had deafened my ears to possible contradictions. Her spectacles were at present a direct contradiction; they seemed a negation not only of new relationships but of every old one as well. I remember nevertheless that when after a moment she walked beside me on the grass I found myself nervously hoping she wouldn't as yet at any rate tell ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... disputed that the old often appear dull-witted, but I cannot believe in a real darkening of the reason, which is a bright spark of the Divine, and even in madness the negation of reason is only external and apparent. A deaf man playing on an instrument out of tune may strike the right notes, and be inwardly persuaded that his execution is faultless, while all around him hear nothing but ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... soul, confronted by eternal judgment, trembling for its estate before divine Almightiness, and, on pain of banishment from every immortal good, forced to condition and dispose itself according to the clear revelations of God. It was not mere negation to an oppressive hierarchy, except as it was first positive and evangelic touching the direct and indefeasible relations and obligations of the soul to its Maker. Only when the hierarchy claimed to qualify these direct relations and obligations, ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... no beginning, neither will it ever have an end. So, then, is it eternal. The negation of aught else, is its affirmation. Where the light cannot come, there abideth the darkness. The light doth but hollow a mine out of the infinite extension of the darkness. And ever upon the steps of the light treadeth the darkness; ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... ordained she should fulfil. Don't start at the sight of the cross; it is the emblem of Christianity, and not of a sect, who claim it exclusively, as if He who suffered on it died for them only. This one has hitherto been used in the negation of all human affections, may it shed a blessing ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... without the other is an impossible conception. The notion of Space permeates that of Matter; passing through it, so to speak, as well as surrounding it; so that it needs no proof that Matter cannot be conceived of as existing without Space. But, on the other hand, Space is only the negation of Matter; the shadow, as it were, cast by Matter; and, so, dependent on Matter for the very origin of the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... voice went its way; and for the rest—what banalities! What ineptitudes! They make the mistake, our modern free-versifiers, of thinking that Art can be founded on the Negation of Form. Art can be founded on every other Negation. But not on that one—never on that one! Certainly they have a right to experiment; to invent—if they can—new forms. But they must invent them. They must not just arrange ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... that a coarseminded man found her lacking in attraction was simply another proof of her quality; yet the words sent a faint shiver through his heart. What if "niceness" carried to that supreme degree were only a negation, the curtain dropped before an emptiness? As he looked at May, returning flushed and calm from her final bull's-eye, he had the feeling that he had ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... bottom of the bed. Cuckoo felt the little dog's back shift against her stretched-out toes, and suddenly a bitter flood of red ran over her thin, half-starved face, and she hid it in the tumbled pillow, pressing it down. The movement was the attempted physical negation of an abominable, treacherous thought which had just stabbed her mind. How could it have come to her, when she hated it so? She burrowed further into the pillow, at the same time caressing the back of Jessie with little movements of her toes. Horrible, horrible thought! ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... negation of his personality the slave thought and acted solely in terms of the social mind of the white. Hence the prevailing idea of the slave, "massa can do no wrong."[345] The slave had no social consciousness, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... expose such cold negation of the instincts is easy: to express or even half express the instincts is very hard. The instincts are very much concerned with what literary people call "style" in letters or more vulgar people call "style" in dress. They are much concerned ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... "Few men do think or inquire very far on sacred subjects! Listen,—for what I have to say to you will but strengthen you in your faith,—and you will need more than all the strength of the Four Evangelists to bear you stiffly up against the suicidal Negation of this present disastrous epoch. Ages ago,—ay, more than six or seven thousand years ago, there were certain communities of men in the East,— scholars, sages, poets, astronomers, and scientists, who, desiring to give themselves ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... with a certain half-joyous, half-foolish maturity of understanding. One day long after this she had humorously bewailed to Bernal the loss of their child's faith in the Gratcher. He had replied that, as an institution, the Gratcher was imperishable—that it was brute humanity's instinctive negation to the incredible perfections of life; that while the child's Gratcher was not the man's, the latter was yet of the same breed, however it might be refined by the subtleties of maturity: that the man, like the child, must fashion ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... Zulus say, meaning as true as a yarn of Allan Quatermain's. Well, my blood was up; no man shall call Allan Quatermain a liar. The fellow was going on with a prodigious palaver about a white feather of Truth, and Mount Sinai, and the Land of Absolute Negation, and I don't know what, but I signified to him that if he did not believe my yarns I did not want his company. "I'm sorry to turn you out," I said, "for there are lions around"—indeed they were roaring to each other—"and ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... Upon which double negation, which he meant as a stronger affirmative, the worthy champion would walk in to play his game ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... its mass of lawyers' terminology. The surreptitious clause ran to this effect: That railroad companies were permitted to exact from their employees overtime work for extra compensation. This practically made the whole law a negation. ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... confusion of scattered bed-clothes; and his arms and body were jerking as a dog's that dreams. She saw a sort of convulsion pinch and pucker his face; then he made some inarticulate sounds—as it were a frantic negation; and then the noise of his own cry awakened him. He looked wildly round and lifted his hands as though he ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... juvenile petticoat, let it remain. But the blackness of black is a superstition that deserves no such courteous concessions. There is, in fact, no black and no white at all, as any black-and-white artist will tell you. Black is not a colour: it is merely the negation of light. By day nothing is ever black—it always contains reflected light from some surrounding object or objects: if you look at a "black" thing by day, you see its details, which convincingly proves that light is not absent. ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... his light-gloved fingers and opened it. There was a silence, during which he read it. He had more than time to read it, but still he said nothing; he stood staring at it. "Where is the original?" asked Madame de Bellegarde, in a voice which was really a consummate negation of impatience. ...
— The American • Henry James
... dirty platform, in a milieu of advertisements of soap, boots, and aperients, I began to believe that Simon Fuge never had lived, that he was a mere illusion of his friends and his small public. All that I saw around me was a violent negation of Simon Fuge, that entity of rare, fine, exotic sensibilities, that perfectly mad gourmet of sensations, that exotic seer ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... his head by way of negation and the words, "It can't be did," were distinctly audible to the majority of both singing society and audience, at the same time a look of contempt spread over the singing-master's face. Quincy perceived ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin
... which we now use by the force of habit, as if they were natural to us. But spontaneous intuition is the true logic of nature,—instant, direct, and infallible. It is a primitive affirmation which implies no negation, and therefore yields positive knowledge. To reflect is to return to that which was. It is, by the aid of memory, to return to the past, and to render it present to the eye of consciousness. Reflection, therefore, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... wanted to bring it forward simply to make what I have to say presently of Mr. Razumov's presence in Geneva, a little more credible—for this is a Russian story for Western ears, which, as I have observed already, are not attuned to certain tones of cynicism and cruelty, of moral negation, and even of moral distress already silenced at our end of Europe. And this I state as my excuse for having left Miss Haldin standing, one of the little group of two women and two men who had come together below the terrace of the ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... made that sweeping gesture of Jeanbernat's, that wide gesture of negation, that took in everything ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... self-satisfaction through negation, through a serene surrender of the unattainable. As the Epicureans counseled, they increase their happiness by lessening their desires. The content which middle-aged people exhibit is not so frequently to be traced ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... [Footnote: It may be worth remarking that while there are many negative nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, and conjunctions in oar language, negation is more frequently expressed in English by the adverb than by any other part of speech—than by all other parts of speech. A very large per cent of these adverbs modify the verb. That is to say, it is largely through the adverb that what the predicate expresses is declared not to be true ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... its absence we do not mean the absence of anything else, nor absence in general; and how, forsooth, does its absence differ from these other absences, save by containing a complete description of the picture? The hole is as round as the plug; and from our thought the 'picture' cannot get away. The negation is specific and descriptive, and what it destroys it preserves tor ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... of view is harmful because it is absolutely false; it is simply the negation of eloquence. Consider what the legislative hall, the lecture room and the court would be like if nothing but set pieces were delivered. We are familiar with the fact that many an orator and lawyer, who is ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... co-equal with experience, but that its value transcends experience. Experience may tell us what is; but it is by the impossibility of conceiving it otherwise that we know it must be. Mr. Herbert Spencer, too, holds that propositions whose negation is inconceivable have "a higher warrant than any other whatever." It is through this door that ontological belief was supposed to enter. "Things in themselves" were to be believed in because we could not help it. Modern Noumenalists agree that we ...
— John Stuart Mill; His Life and Works • Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison and Other
... British head was agitated in vigorous negation, and "Card for Mister Kirkwood!" was mumbled in dispassionate accents appropriate to ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... is that of Limitation. As the first is sometimes called that of Affirmation, so this is called that of Negation. It prescribes that a thing is not that which it is not. Its formula is, "A is not not-A." If this seems trivial, it is because it is ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... conventions and the permission of promiscuous love. The spirit of adventure is in the air; and with even a good chance of escaping the penalties, there are many who will seize their opportunities for enjoyment, preferring a present pleasure with its spice of risk to a dull negation of desire. We must then go on with the argument and point out that even where these terrible results are escaped, the way of free love is not the ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... her brain worked rapidly over this calm negation of his, "But you can't be unaware, Beth, that ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... intellect," as George Eliot has said, "which causes ready repulsion from the aberration and eccentricities of greatness, any more than it is force of vision that causes the eye to explore the warts in a face bright with human expression; it is simply the negation ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... to be done did not prevent, but rather tended to increase, the reform enthusiasm. All had at least one common feeling—dislike to what had previously existed. It was only when it became necessary to forsake pure negation, and to create something, that the conceptions became clearer, and a variety of opinions appeared. At the first moment there was merely unanimity in negation, and an impulsive enthusiasm for beneficent reforms ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... "my cousin may be the most innocent soul alive. She is born to a ready-made situation, and accepts it. But it is a situation which I, if I am to be loyal to my tradition, cannot accept. It is the negation of my tradition. I am obliged to submit to it, but I can't accept it. My cousin is the embodiment of the anti-tradition. You say—marry her. That is like inviting the Pope to ally himself with ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... interest of passion is thus inseparable from the active development of a general principle; for it is from the special and determinate, and from its negation, that the universal results. Particularity contends with its like, and some loss is involved in the issue. It is not the general idea that is implicated in opposition and combat, and that is exposed ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... A roar of negation went up from the rear of the room, and an ominous murmur spread from man to man. Only those grouped around Peter, some Americans, the Scot, Brierly, the ex-soldier, Jesse Brown, and one or two of the Italians remained silent, but whether in ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... Humanity but none of them worth putting into words in the face of this deadly machine of war, this grim, austere, unyielding tribunal. He wavered for a moment on his feet as a terrible wave of despair surged over him, then made a faint gesture of negation. ...
— The Littlest Rebel • Edward Peple
... explain that his oversight had a good excuse in the fact that my existence must have been unknown to him, but he silenced me with his two outstretched hands, waving a violent negation. ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... tremendous effort of the so-called glorious Reformation, together with its twin sister—the unbelief of the nineteenth century. Whole legions of church reformers, together with armies of philosophers armed with negation, and a thousand and one systems of Paganism, rushed on against the Chair of Peter, and swore that the Papacy would fall, and with it the whole Church. Three hundred years are over, and the Catholic Church is still alive, ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... difference was so slight as to seem a mere matter of form of expression, yet the different foundations on which the two schools stood was always recognisable. On the one hand there was the germ of idealism which was destined to awake to a new life, and on the other, the attempt at absolute negation which was to result in the final extinction of Pyrrhonism. We find in both, it is true, especially in the time of Arcesilaus, the aim of [Greek: epoche].[1] Both placed great weight on [Greek: isostheneia], or the equal value of opposing arguments.[2] ...
— Sextus Empiricus and Greek Scepticism • Mary Mills Patrick
... fear death for the simple reason that she died in a sure and certain faith and in strict obedience to the commands of the Gospel. Her whole life had been one of pure, disinterested love, of utter self-negation. Had her convictions been of a more enlightened order, her life directed to a higher aim, would that pure soul have been the more worthy of love and reverence? She accomplished the highest and best achievement in this world: ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... case than this of the degraded position of the father. And what I want to make clear is that in such negation of all father-right rested the inherent weakness in the matriarchal conditions—a weakness which led eventually to the re-establishment of the paternal family. We must be very clear in our minds as to the ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... the hill, and saw Undern Pool curdling and thickening in the frost. No sound came across the outspread country. There were no roads near Undern except its own cart track; there were no railways within miles. Nothing moved except the snow-flakes, fulfilling their relentless destiny of negation. She saw them only, and heard only the raised voices in ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... life and its negation are beaten up inextricably together. But if the life be good, the negation of it must be bad. Yet the two are equally essential facts of existence; and all natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... reconciled with these; so that it might be taken as an inpouring of sudden light upon old conceptions of the Power, glorifying and transfiguring them, rather than, like the Epicurean faith, a bitter and contemptuous negation of man's inherited religious instincts. But before we go on to consider this illumination more closely, let me say a few words about Panaetius the Stoic missionary, and Scipio ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... ordered to attend the house; and when this was negatived, he moved an address to his majesty, praying that the house might be acquainted at what time reparation was first demanded from Spain, which likewise received a negation. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... of the Temple winds up, in short, with the indication that, if both are completely thought out, the gospel of Faith is no more irrational than the gospel of scientific negation, and that the former can be a guide to action, whereas, if thought out completely, this is precisely what the latter ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... her head in a faint negation that only half understood what he was saying, her whole ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... enjoyment upon the deep waters into which Draper and Lecky and Laing and the rest had hurled him. He dallied pleasurably, a little languorously, with a dozen aspects of the case against revealed religion, ranging from the mild heterodoxy of Andover's qualms to the rude Ingersoll's rollicking negation of God himself, as a woman of coquetry might play with as many would-be lovers. They amused him; they were all before him to choose; and he was free to postpone indefinitely the act of selection. There was a sense of the luxurious in this position which softened bodily ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... activity which constitutes life has ceased. Changes such as putrefaction take place in the dead body, but they are changes which would take place in any mass similarly constituted, and are not influenced by the fact that the mass was once living. Disease may also be thought of as the negation of the normal. There is, however, in living things no definite type for the normal. An ideal normal type may be constructed by taking the average of a large number of individuals; but any single individual of the group will, to a greater or less extent, depart from it. No two individuals ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... like wax which their age imprints. They are often the mere negation and opposite of their age. They give it the lie. They become by revolt the very essence of all the age is not, and that part of the spirit which is suppressed in ten thousand breasts gets lodged, isolated, and breaks into utterance in one. Through Emerson spoke ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... ideal from actuality.[62] In it the world-weary age of the later renaissance sought escape from the materialism that bound it. Italy had turned its back upon mysticism in religion, and upon chivalry in love; its literature was the negation of what the northern peoples understand by romance. Yet it needed some relief from the very saneness of its rationalism, and it found the antidote to its vicious court life in the crystal springs of Castaly. What the pietism of Perugino's saints is to the feuds of the Baglioni, such is the Arcadian ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... struck him how strangely inverted these thoughts were; what an utter negation of his waking thoughts, as they flashed through his mind while Garthorne was speaking. They seemed perfectly reasonable to him, and—so subtle was the miracle wrought by those two spoonsful of ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... among these is against the coloured race being educated and evangelized.... Only what can and must be said is this, that the Laws of the English Colonies are just; those of the Boer States are the negation of every right, civil and religious, which the black man ought to have." I have similar testimonies from missionaries (not Englishmen); but I regret to say that these good men hesitate to have ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler
... he said to me, when I tried to persuade him out of writing the first letter, "you forget how much I have of sin upon me. Can years of negation of faith, or the ruin of four young lives, and I know not of how many more, be repented of at ease in your pleasant town, amid the amiable cares you young people are good enough to ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... had recognized its value. In grammar and arithmetic, as with astronomy, they seemed not to have advanced greatly, if at all, upon the Egyptians. One field in which they stand out in startling pre-eminence is the field of astrology; but this, in the estimate of modern thought, is the very negation of science. Babylonia impressed her superstitions on the Western world, and when we consider the baleful influence of these superstitions, we may almost question whether we might not reverse Canon Rawlinson's estimate and say that perhaps but for Babylonia real civilization, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... verve, the triumphant personal fertility of Rude and Carpeaux. At least, such as there is has not preserved the dignity and in many instances scarcely the decorum of those splendid artists. Much of the sculpture which figures at the yearly Salons is, to be sure, the absolute negation of style; its main characteristic is indeed eccentricity; its main virtues, sincerity (which in art, of course, is only a very elementary virtue) and good modelling (which in sculpture is equally elementary). Occasionally in the midst ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... inflection; as when we say, Fire burns; the change of the second word from burn to burns showing that we mean to affirm the predicate burn of the subject fire. But this function is more commonly fulfilled by the word is, when an affirmation is intended, is not, when a negation; or by some other part of the verb to be. The word which thus serves the purpose of a sign of predication is called, as we formerly observed, the copula. It is important that there should be no indistinctness ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... the light began to fade in her, gradually, and as she was in his arms, her head sank, she leaned it against him, and lay still, with sunk head, a little tired, effaced because she was tired. And in her tiredness was a certain negation of him. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... the circumstances which explain the rude and vigorous scepticism of Diderot's first performances. And they explain the influence of Shaftesbury over him. Neither Diderot nor his contemporaries were ready at once to plunge into the broader and firmer negation to which they afterwards committed themselves. No doubt some of the politeness which he shows to Christianity, both in the notes to his translation of Shaftesbury, and in his own Philosophic Thoughts, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... a hand at him in negation. "No, everybody doesn't have it made. Almost everybody's bogged down. That's the trouble Sam. The guts have been taken out of us. And ninety-nine people out of a hundred don't care. They've got bread and butter security. They've got trank to keep them happy. And they've got the fracases to watch, ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... {Negation.} Negation in sentences is expressed by {ne} ({en, n}) before the verb, and {niht} after it: {[e:]r enist guot}, he is not good. {niht} is frequently omitted, especially after the preterite presents, the verbs {wellen}, {l[a]n}, sentences containing negative pronouns ...
— A Middle High German Primer - Third Edition • Joseph Wright
... After a while such words as "impracticable" and "impossible" lose their absoluteness and become only synonyms for the relatively difficult. He has so often found a way out, where humanly speaking there was none, that he no longer looks upon a logical dilemma as a final negation ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... loves me, though with scorn She treats my adoration; I know she loves me, though my suit She checks with strong negation. ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... extends down the neck and is visible in spite of his dusky skin. Laughter is never immoderate enough to bring tears to the eyes. The head is nodded vertically in affirmation and shaken laterally in negation only by ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... was not un esprit puissant. Other and younger critics, who have attained to a cock-certain mood of negation, are apt to blame him because, in fact, he did not finally agree with their opinions. If a man is necessarily a weakling or a hypocrite because, after trying all things, he is not an atheist or a materialist, then the reproach of insincerity or of feebleness of mind ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... morning of the 13th of November, 1809, it occurs to me, that it is by a negation and voluntary act of no thinking that we think of earth, air, water, &c. as dead. It is necessary for our limited powers of consciousness, that we should be brought to this negative state, and that this state should pass into custom; ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... was delighted at all this destruction; he also hated, but it was with a calm, reflective hate bred in the seminary, all positive and material sciences, for the sum total of his reasoning was that they came perilously near to the negation of God; those sons of the mountains in their blessed ignorance, had without knowing it done a great deed. Ah! if only the whole nation would imitate them! In former times there were none of these ridiculous inventions of science, and Spain was far happier. To live a holy life, the learning ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... certain qualities in his nature which were eminently calculated to win and keep the respect of women as well as of men. He was the very incarnation of sincerity, and had now and again, in certain ways, a sublime self-negation which, at times, seemed in startling contrast to a manifestly militant nature. When at school he had often been involved in fights which were nearly always on matters of principle, and by a sort of unconscious ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... things of a simple, wandering life. These symbols were compounded to form ideographs, as aleph a, and lamed l, being the first and last of the zodiacal circle, were employed for the name of the Creator, the reverse of these, la, signifying non-existence, negation, privation. In course of time a language and a literature would be evolved, but from the simple elements of a nomadic life. Knowledge came to them by action and the use of the physical sense. They had no other or more appropriate confession of this than is seen in the root [Hebrew letters] yedo— ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... in knowledge of Thibet in your Indian life? My life work lies there, and Hugh has sorely disappointed me. He was to send me books and maps and papers for my 'History of Thibet and the Wanderings of the Ten Tribes.'" With a confused negation the girl had fled away to the cheerless shelter of the great rooms whose drab and gray arrangements bespoke the Reformatory or a ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... and every now and then cast an angry look upon him, which was received with a still and sober carriage: at last the King broke out into these words: 'We are informed that you have cheated us of certain lands in Middlesex'; whereunto, having received none other than a plain and humble negation, after some little time he replied, 'How was it then? Did we give these lands to you?' Whereunto Sir Edward answered, 'Yes, Sire, your majesty was pleased to do so.' Whereupon, having paused a little while, ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... the intellectual horizon and intensified the enthusiasm for beauty. Men's interest in life was no longer narrowly religious, but human; their art became the expression of the new spirit. Early Christianity had been ascetic, enjoining negation of life and the mortification of the flesh. The men of the Renaissance, with something of the feeling of the elder Greeks, glorified the body and delighted in the pride of life. Pagan myths and Greek legends take their place alongside of Bible ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... remote from that which is the absolutely true. He considers that this is proven by the very nature of the "law of contradiction" itself, which must be inconsistent with the character of absolute thought. For in the latter, positive truth only can exist, therefore no negation, and no law about the relation of ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... self-righteousness which at once came over the English Press, in which "the hereditary foe of small nationalities" was suddenly changed into "the champion of all honour, justice, and truth in the world"—which was particularly galling, if not actually ludicrous, to a race which was so obviously the negation of any such a claim—at least, so ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... like some infernal yeast? What terrible energy, what malignant, vindictive lust infected that place? What distorted, unhappy soul first sickened there? How long ago? How long ago? Are there centres of negation? Oh, I tell you, the table-tippers are harmless beside the sickening truths, the simply incredible possibilities of this little crevice ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... predominant note. Joy appeared to have passed away as a factor of life, and this creative impulse had nothing to take its place. That giant spot in high air was a plague of evil influence. It seemed like a new misanthropic belief which had fallen on human beings, carrying with it the negation ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... Duke of Abercorn, with upraised arm, and calling on the audience solemnly to repeat the words one by one after him, gave out what became for the future the motto and watchword of Ulster loyalty: "We will not have Home Rule." It was felt that this simple negation constituted a solemn vow taken by the delegates, both for themselves and for those they represented—an act of self-dedication to which every loyal man and woman in Ulster was committed, and from which there could be no ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... in negation, and his dark-brown eyes commanded hers, but still deferentially, as he said: "You know of what I was thinking. You will be forever young, but yours was always—will always be—the wisdom of the wise. I'd like to have ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Of course mere negation cannot carry us far. We sometimes hear it said that it is as easy for a house to look well as to look ill, and those who say this seem to think that the failure is due solely to want of due consideration of the problem on the part of our builders, and that we have but to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... of Mary of Burgundy, and went on his way out of the chiming city as its matin bells were rung, and took with him a certain regret, and the only innocent affection that had ever awakened in him; and thought of his self-negation with half admiration and half derision; and so drifted away into the whirlpool of his amorous, cynical, changeful, passionate, callous, many-colored life, and said to himself as he saw the last line of the ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... every one positive doctrine which all of us who profess the religion authoritatively taught in England hold ourselves, according to our faculties, bound to believe. The Catholics of Ireland (as I have said) have the whole of our positive religion: our difference is only a negation of certain tenets of theirs. If we strip ourselves of that part of Catholicism, we abjure Christianity. If we drive them from that holding, without engaging them in some other positive religion, (which you know by our qualifying laws we do not,) what do we ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... one, in the same sense the scientific paradox is true: that matter and electricity are one, and both are doubtless a phase of the universal ether—a reality which can be described only in terms of the negation of matter. In a flash of lightning we see pure disembodied energy—probably that which is the main-spring of the universe. Modern science is more and more inclined to find the explanation of all vital phenomena in electrical stress and change. We know that an electric current will bring about ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... like the despotic. When its ire is aroused it develops its latent strength, and the sturdiest rebel trembles. But its habitual domestic rule is tolerant, patient, and indecisive. Men are brought together, first to differ, and then to agree. Affirmation, negation, discussion, solution: these are the means of attaining truth. Often the enemy will be at the gates before the babble of the disturbers is drowned in the chorus of consent. In the Legislative office deliberation ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... sadness. The main thing to be said with regard to it, is that I had a secret from him. I believe he never suspected it, though of this I am not absolutely sure. If he did, the line he had taken, the line of absolute negation of the matter to himself, shows an immense effort of the will. I may tell my secret now, giving it for what it is worth, now that Mark Ambient has gone, that he has begun to be alluded to as one of the famous early dead, and that his wife does not survive him; now, ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... needed for an era of moral fellowship such as Mr. Wilson was supposed to be intent on establishing. Consequently, a peace treaty unmodified by the principles underlying the Covenant is necessarily a negation of the main possibilities of a society of nations based upon right and a decisive argument against ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... what an intensity of the negation of the faculty of sculpture this implies in the national mind! What measure can be assigned to the gulf of incapacity, which can deliberately swallow up in the gorge of it the teaching and example of three thousand years, and produce, ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... imply an affirmative. Hence only one should be used to denote negation: [I have nothing to say. I have ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... ha de querer ocultarte nada?: why should he wish to conceal anything from you? 'Anything' is expressed in Spanish by nada (not algo) whenever negation is expressed or implied. Negation is here implied by the ...
— Ms vale maa que fuerza • Manuel Tamayo y Baus |
