"Preconception" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be well here, in order to clear away a possible preconception by the reader, to try and dispel the illusion that army and navy officers are eager for war, in order that they may get promotion. This idea has been exploited by people opposed to the development of the army and navy, and has been received with so much credulity ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... of congratulation and exhortation which I made to myself on dying at an age when I had the courage to meet death with serenity, without having experienced any great evils, either of body or mind. How much justice was there in the thought! A preconception of what I had to suffer made me fear to live, and it seemed that I dreaded the fate which must attend my future days. I have never been so near wisdom as during this period, when I felt no great remorse for the past, nor ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... by an equally strong conviction of his guilt. Nor was his mind, probably, imbued with much of that religious scruple which made the idea of a feigned marriage so insupportable to all Hester's relations. Nor was he aware that when a man has taken a preconception home to himself and fastened it and fixed it, as it were, into his bosom, he cannot easily expel it,—even though personal interest should be on the side of such expulsion. It had become a settled belief with the Boltons that John Caldigate ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... chimed with my Puritan education. I left England with a fermentation of art ideas in my brain, in which the influence of Turner and Pyne, the teachings of Wehnert, and the work of the Pre-Raphaelites mingled with the influence of Ruskin, and especially the preconception of art work derived from the descriptions, often strangely misleading, of the ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... ourselves by searching. We must dig for it; we must grope after it. And as he spoke, I made up my mind, in a flash of resolution, to find out the Truth for myself about everything, and never to be deterred from seeking it, and embracing it, and ensuing it when found, by any convention or preconception. Then he went on to say how the Truth would make us Free, and I felt he was right. It would open our eyes, and emancipate us from social and moral slaveries. So I made up my mind, at the same time, that whenever I found the Truth I would not scruple to follow it to its logical conclusions, ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... force belongs to a vivid preconception, if this happens to fit only very roughly the impression of the moment, that is to say, if the interpretative image is one of the possible suggestions of the impression. The play of imagination takes a wider ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... length come to Millard like an inundation sweeping away the barriers of habit and preconception, he was quite aware that Phillida Callender's was not a temperament to forget duty in favor of inclination, and the strength of his desire to possess her served as a restraint upon his action. He followed the habits of business negotiation even in love-making; he put ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... study of the science, anything more accurate would be useless, and therefore pedantic. In a merely initiatory definition, scientific precision is not required: the object is, to insinuate into the learner's mind, it is scarcely material by what means, some general preconception of what are the uses of the pursuit, and what the series of topics through which he is about to travel. As a mere anticipation or ebauche of a definition, intended to indicate to a learner as much as he is able to understand ...
— Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... breaking ground upon this almost impracticable subject, is—to show the student a true map of the field in which his labours are to lie. Most people have a vague preconception, peopling the fancy with innumerable shadows, of some vast wilderness or Bilidulgerid of trackless time, over which are strewed the wrecks of events without order, and persons without limit. Omne ignotum, says ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... should think you might do better with your education than you could by following the usual employments of your kind of people," resumed the other, still unwilling to see the subject of her scrutiny fall so much below her preconception of an educated Indian. "You say, lawyers, preachers, and doctors make money from the superiority which their education has given them; now, why don't you profit by your education, and go into a profession like one of theirs, ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... is what appears in itself of little moment, and yet is of incalculably great,—that is, workmanship,—the art by which the thoughts are made to melt into each other, and to fall into light and shadow, regulated by distinct preconception of the best general effect they are capable of producing. This may seem very vague to you, but by conversation I think I could make it appear otherwise. It is enough for the present to say that I was much gratified, and beg you would thank your sister for favouring ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... similar biases; and one gentleman, who was a strenuous advocate of the system of the latter, enforced one equivocal remembrance by saying, he could, as it were, distinctly see the very spot on the page before his mind's eye. Such tricks will imagination play with the memory, when preconception plays tricks with the imagination! In like manner; it was seen that, while the Calvinist was very distinct in his recollection of the ninth chapter of Romans, his memory was very faint as respects the exact wording of some of ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers |
