"Doubter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... the growth of faith. That bold denier of accepted creeds - That mighty doubter of accepted truths - Shall yet reveal God's secrets to the world, And prove the facts it seeks to overthrow. And a new name shall Science henceforth bear - The Great ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the things he says to them, you are of those Christians, if you WILL be called by the name, to whom he will say, I never knew you: go forth into the outer darkness. Then at least will the church be rid of you, and the honest doubter will have room to breathe the divine air ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... 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 one of ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... development which 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, the gods can only hold their place on condition that they are what God must be, ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... and how his vessel to Salamis had scarce escaped the Egyptian triremes, and how by this time all entrance and exit was surely closed. But even now many an angry captain called him "liar." The strife of words was at white heat when Eurybiades himself silenced the fiercest doubter. ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... the 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
... not the city government make a piece of work of putting an end to such a scandal?" inquired a doubter in spectral visitations. ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous
... 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
... 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 ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... principles was to be subjected to a re-examination, and Descartes found himself on bedrock when he touched his famous Cogito, ergo sum. The simple fact or act of Doubt implied the Activity—the Reality therefore—of the Doubter. But the cogitant subject was reduced very much to the condition of a tabula rasa, and when Descartes proceeded to fill up the blank with a rediscovery on more scientific lines of the essentials of Cognition he found his basal feature in Extension. Tridimensional Space seemed the simple elementary ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... Herrick, 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 smokers, Pulling ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... 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 ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... this ancient and half-ruined pile of stone and make-believe rocks," Arthur told the doubter, "couldn't find a purchaser in a coon's age. Who would ever want to come away up here to bury themselves from civilization, and in such a silly old rookery as this? Well, it was one chance in a thousand that a nervous wreck like your aunt heard ...
— The Boy Scouts with the Motion Picture Players • Robert Shaler
... into the invisible." Like 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 for the other shore." ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... One 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 facts but ...
— Adventures in the Land of Canaan • Robert Lee Berry
... Socratic method; and soon after I procured Xenophon's Memorable Things of Socrates, wherein there are many instances of the same method. I was charmed with it, adopted it, dropped my abrupt contradiction and positive argumentation, and put on the humble inquirer and doubter. And being then, from reading Shaftesbury and Collins, become a real doubter in many points of our religious doctrine, I found this method safest for myself and very embarrassing to those against whom I used ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... part of the war, I was a doubter of nobility in others and a sceptic as regards myself. The growth of my personal vision was complete when I recognised that the capacity of heroism is latent in everybody, and only awaits the bigness of the ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... 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 they, in a short time, exchanged their state of ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... uncompromising champion of spiritual independence, and of the rights of the Christian people. He took his place far in the van. He was no mere half-and-half non-intrusionist,—no complaisant eulogist of the Veto,—no timid doubter that the Church in behalf of her people might possibly stretch her powers too far, and thus separate her temporalities from her cures. Nothing could be more absurd, he asserted, than to imagine ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... inhibition of law, their methods were duly legalized. The explanation was not hard to find. These same propertied classes had made the code of laws as it stood; and if any doubter denies that laws at all times have exactly corresponded with the interest and aims of the ruling class, all that is necessary is to compare the laws of the different periods with the profitable methods of that class, and he will ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... 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 ...
— The Defects of the Negro Church - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 10 • Orishatukeh Faduma
... 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 up and smoke along the ground. It seemed as if ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... one lesson was "Well, if we don't learn Esperanto, we shall learn English."] For this reason and also that this language cannot be learned simply as a matter of rote, but demands the exercise of the thinking and reasoning powers, [Footnote: To convince an opponent or a doubter of this, tell him that "utila" means "useful," and "mal" denotes the contrary; then ask what "malutila" means. The answer will almost certainly be "useless." Then show that the contrary of a good quality is not merely the absence of that quality, but is a bad quality, ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... was doubtless very different from the 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 there, the talent to understand a tragic situation, ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... my mind for any length of time. I could remember that it had satisfied me once, but that was not to feel its satisfying power then. And you could not go back to your books continually, and pore over the arguments forever. So that long before I became a doubter, I felt that the historical argument could never be useful to people generally, either in producing faith where it was not, or in perpetuating it where it was. I was sure that if mankind at large were to be brought to receive and cherish Christianity, it must be by proofs of a simpler and ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... 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 ...
— All's for the Best • T. S. Arthur
... mocked and scourged the meek Redeemer, who had crowned his guileless head with thorns, who had pierced and slain him. The rack, the gibbet, and the stake were not enough to glut the pious hate this priestly trickery inspired. It was not enough that the doubter's life should go out in the blaze of the crackling fagots, but it must be loaded in eternity with the curses ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... and so on. It 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
... such 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 ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler
... young friend's condition with anxiety. Was it the prison life—or was it perhaps the books—that had transformed this young man, who had once gone ahead with tempestuous recklessness, into a hesitating doubter who could not come to a decision? Personality was of doubtful value when it grew at the expense of energy. It had been the old man's hope that it would have developed greater energy through being replanted in fresh, ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... 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 ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... this type of doubter everywhere—and especially in India where official rank is but the guinea stamp and ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... find the readers that must listen to them and delight in them, as the "Ancient Mariner" fastened upon the man who must hear him. If any doubter wishes to test his fitness for reading them, and if the poems already mentioned are not enough to settle the question, let him read the paragraph ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... stopped in 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 ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... utter the mighty affirmations of the Gospel:—That the way to win again 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
... one of the talismanic names of the Revolution, the very mention of which is like the sound of a trumpet. Such names are the precious jewels of our history, to be garnered up among the treasures of the nation, and kept immaculate from the tarnishing breath of the cynic and the doubter. ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... will be recalled that the boy Robinson, accuser of the Lancashire women in 1634, had been brought into his Yorkshire congregation at an afternoon service and had come off very poorly when cross-questioned by the curious minister. From that time Webster had been a doubter. Now and again in the course of his Yorkshire and Lancashire pastorates he had come into contact with superstition. He was no philosopher, this Yorkshire doctor of souls and bodies, nor was he more than a country scientist, ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... And the spring offensive! I have seen that kind of vernal gladness. What an advent! When you find the first blue egg in the shrubbery behind your billet in Artois; when the G. S. O. 2 comes into the mess with a violet in his fingers, and shows it to every doubter, then you know the time has come for the testing of the gas cylinders, and you wonder whether this is the last time you will be noteworthy because you had the earliest news of the chiffchaff. The spring ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... man—that's a man after my own heart—a man quite after my own heart!" The other said with rather doubtful and hesitating confirmation, "Ye-s." "You don't seem to think so highly of him as I do," said the first speaker. "Why," replied the doubter, "I can't say I do; you remember some time ago he failed, and certainly upon that occasion he behaved very ill to, not to say cheated, his creditors." "Ah!" said the first commendator again, "that is very likely—I ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Personal Touch • J. Wilbur Chapman
... 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 well. ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... Terry's mildly flavored shafts of sarcasm, he made no enemies and his kind heart and sterling honesty were respected far and near. He was considered a doubter and skeptic, and though seldom seen at church, as he had originally contributed his share when that edifice was built, his lack of ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... the fur parkie he wore, took 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 ...
— The Trail of a Sourdough - Life in Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... religion is 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 ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... curious mark in a stone at Jerusalem. According to this, St. Thomas, after the ascension of the Lord, was again troubled with doubts, whereupon the Virgin Mother threw down her girdle, which left its imprint upon the rock, and thus converted the doubter ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... workman he was exact and his tools were always in perfect order. In brief he was a Yankee, as concentrated a bit of New England as was ever transplanted to the border. Hopelessly "sot" in all his eastern ways, he remained the doubter, the critic, all ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... Pays Bas," in three, together with the Records of the "Conseil des Troubles," in forty-three folio volumes, in the Royal Archives at Brussels. After going through all these chronicles of iniquity, the most determined historic, doubter will probably throw ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... was, as corroboration for so outrageous a facture as the cognomen Daddleskink, but it served to convince the doubter. ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams |
