"Mysticism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is meant that sense and piety should grow together: in Dryden's description a combination of Mysticism And Bigotry (can this be the double Vahu?), personified as "the priest,"—who always catches it on this score, though the same spirit is found in all associations,—succeeds the boguey-teaching of the nurse. Never was the contrast of smile and scowl, of ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... Of his mysticism, of the symbolism in which his "Journal Intime" is written in his own firm cipher, this little book is not the place to speak; though for those who have once come to know the true Holbein these have a spell, a stern, inexhaustible enchantment all ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... fireplace, was a bookcase. On the shelves were volumes of Shakespeare, Dante, Emerson, Wordsworth, Browning, Christina Rossetti, Newman's "Dream of Gerontius" and "Apologia," Thomas a Kempis, several works on mystics and mysticism, a life of St. Catherine of Genoa, another of St. Francis of Assisi, St. Ignatius Loyola's "Spiritual Exercises," Pascal's "Letters," etc., etc. Over the windows ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... quotations. Such massive head-lines—that soon sink into platitudinous prose; such robust swinging rhythms, Emerson told Walt that he must have had a "long foreground." It is true. Notwithstanding his catalogues of foreign countries, he was hardly a cosmopolitan. Whitman's so-called "mysticism" is a muddled echo of New England Transcendentalism; itself a pale dilution of an outworn German idealism—what Coleridge called "the holy jungle of Transcendental metaphysics." His concrete imagination automatically rejected metaphysics. ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... I was afraid it was. I was resolved to pay some tribute of sympathy to the unhonoured dead; but I wrote, as usual, with a total ignorance of the effect that I should produce.' (To Ollier, 25 September.) 'The Adonais, in spite of its mysticism, is the least imperfect of my compositions; and, as the image of my regret and honour for poor Keats, I wish it to be so. I shall write to you probably by next post on the subject of that poem; and should have sent the promised criticism ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... offers to the student of our science is due to the fact that it presents in an unbroken sequence a growth of religious thought, which, beginning with simple conceptions and advancing to a great priestly ritual, can be seen to pass into mysticism and asceticism, and thence to the rejection of all gods and rites, and a system of salvation by individual good conduct. Nowhere else can the progress of religion through what we might call its seven ages of life be seen so ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... of Nature were incorporated in the grand and beautiful human forms of the Olympian gods, or in the dread shapes of the Infernal deities. But even among those of the Greeks who were raised far above the ordinary superstitions of the populace we find many traces of mysticism and magic, as for example in connexion with oracles, with divine healing, with the efficacy of images and other sacred objects, and especially in connexion with Orphic and other Mysteries. And, while for the most part Greek ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... he may be plundered by plagiarists; but he cannot be imitated, except by those who are not born to be imitators. For without his depth of feeling and his imaginative power his sense would want its vital warmth and peculiarity; and without his strong sense, his mysticism would become sickly—mere ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... remark of his, towards the end of the meal, anent the mysticism, the spiritism of the East, and the growing cult of the same order in the West, appeared to suddenly wake her from her dreaminess. Her dark eyes were turned quickly up to his, a new and eager ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... unable to give his principal energies to thought and work—that is, he will not be a good typical engineer. If sensuality appear at all largely in this central body, therefore,—a point we must leave open here—it will appear without any trappings of sentiment or mysticism, frankly on Pauline lines, wine for the stomach's sake, and it is better to marry than to burn, a concession to the flesh necessary to secure efficiency. Assuming in our typical case that pure indulgence does not appear or flares ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... theory of evolution, from the earliest scientific writings that have been preserved, those of the Greek philosophers, down to the present time. The author shows how the ruling classes, living on the labor of others, have always supported some form of theology or mysticism, while the working classes have developed the theory of evolution, which is rounded out to its logical completion by the work of Marx, Engels and Dietzgen. The author frankly recognizes that no writer can avoid ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... writings, it is conceded that "The Blue Bird" makes the strongest appeal to children. Maeterlinck has always had much in common with the young. He has the child's mysticism and awe of the unknown, the same delight in mechanical inventions, the same gift ...
— The Blue Bird for Children - The Wonderful Adventures of Tyltyl and Mytyl in Search of Happiness • Georgette Leblanc
... 2020. The stories connected with these people are as tragic and wildly romantic as are most of the stories in the history of Louisiana. In fact, this colony from the very first owed not a little of its abandon and its fascination to the mysticism that the Negroes themselves brought from Africa. In the midst of much that is apocryphal one or two events or episodes stand out with distinctness. In 1729, Perier, governor at the time, testified with reference ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... moralists. Yet he taught what he felt the people could receive, and the flat mediocrity of his character and his teachings has been stamped forever upon a people who, while they are kindly, gentle, forbearing, and full of family piety, are palpably lacking not only in the exaltation of Mysticism, but in any religious ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... equanimity the old German philosopher had borne it. Here is the answer of Sand's mother; it will serve to show the character of the woman whose mighty heart never belied itself in the midst of the severest suffering; the answer bears the stamp of that German mysticism of which we have ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... of Lucia. The thin lips which had seemed to him so utterly unattractive had touched Lucia's, and were baptized into her freshness and her charm; her eyes had looked into Lucia's and carried something of their light. In her presence he drifted into a sort of mysticism peculiar to lovers, seeing the hand of a holy destiny in the chance that had seated him beside her. Though her shrewdness might divine his secret he felt that with her it would ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... than either her verses or her letters, her ‘Thoughts’ on the ‘Mystery of the Death of Christ,’ are in some respects very fine, and might even claim a place beside some of those of her brother. They are equally elevated in tone, and pervaded by the same subtle, penetrating, radiant mysticism, the same rapture of self-sacrificing aspiration, though lacking the glow of inward fire and exquisite charm of style which marked the author of the ‘Pensées.’ Noble-minded and full of genius, she was yet without his depth and power of feeling, or his skill and finish as an author. In 1646 ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... of perfection consisted in the repose and complete inaction of the soul, that life ought to be one of entire passive contemplation, and that good works and active industry were only fitting for those who were toiling in a lower sphere and had not attained to the higher regions of spiritual mysticism. Thus the '[Greek: Aesuchastai]' on Mount Athos contemplated their nose or their navel, and called the effect of their meditations "the divine light," and Molinos pined in his dungeon, and left his works to be castigated by the renowned Bossuet. The pious, devout, and learned Spanish divine ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... criminal type has arranged this whole elaborate setting as a plot to get rid of the wife who brought him his fortune and now stands in the way of his unholy love of Mrs. Langhorne. He used you to get the poison with which you treated him. He used the Rapports with money to play on her mysticism by their so-called death thought, while he watched his opportunity ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... curious collection of the later Catholic literature, where Lacordaire and the Comte de Falloux, Veuillot and Ozanam, find their place side by side with the half-prophetic, half-ingenious Hello, the amalgam of a monstrous mysticism and a casuistical sensuality, Barbey d'Aurevilly. His collection of 'profane' writers is small, but it is selected for the qualities of exotic charm that have come to be his only care in art—for the somewhat diseased, or the ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... human race, being gradually dispelled. On one point we may reasonably rest assured that the knowledge of right and wrong and our sense of justice and right-living have been developed quite independently of all religious beliefs. The moral law embodied in the golden rule is not an outgrowth of mysticism, or of man's notions of the unknowable; but, on the contrary, is the result of experience, and was formulated in response to a recognized law of human necessity,—a law which involves the fundamental principle ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... Elizabethans, Goethe and Heine. For his taste has been catholic always; he admires Meredith as he admires Dickens, Hello and Pascal no less than Schopenhauer. And it is this catholicity, this open mind, this eager search for truth, that have enabled him to emerge from the mysticism that once enwrapped him to the clearer daylight of actual existence; it is this faculty of admiring all that is admirable in man and in life that some day, perhaps, may ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... of Roumanille elevated, yet it always addresses itself to the people of Provence, and borrows its images from the many-colored life of those to whom it speaks; religious, but simple and ingenuous, with a tinge of mysticism,—not the mysticism that seeks the good in dreamy inaction, as in some of the Spanish authors, nor has it the obscure tinge of the transcendental English school. The religion of Roumanille is active, not dogmatic; he incites ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... only the separating wall of personality and individual consciousness comes in between—that is the New Testament teaching of the relation of the Christian to Christ. Is it your experience, dear brother? Do not be frightened by talking about mysticism. If a Christianity has no mysticism it has no life. There is a wholesome mysticism and there is a morbid one, and the wholesome one is the very nerve of the Gospel as it is presented by Jesus Himself: 'I am the Vine, ye are the branches. Abide in Me, and I in ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... cradled in the practices and poetry of Catholicism, Pierrette opened her heart and ears to the words of this imposing priest. Sufferings predispose the mind to devotion, and nearly all young girls, impelled by instinctive tenderness, are inclined to mysticism, the deepest aspect of religion. The priest found good soil in which to sow the seed of the Gospel and the dogmas of the Church. He completely changed the current of the girl's thoughts. Pierrette loved ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... vehicle of expression, namely an alphabet, so deeply had the Persian domination imprinted itself upon the land. As might be expected, the primary results of the revival were didactic, speculative, or religious in character. Mysticism at that time flourished in the monasteries, and the national spirit—the customs, habits, joys, and emotions of the people—had not yet found re-expression in script. The Church became the dominant power in literature, and if it is true on the one ...
— Armenian Literature • Anonymous
... favourite creation, in dismay and bewilderment, describes the strange experience she has witnessed in the case of a friend, another maiden, and Prometheus tells her that what she had seen was death. What death meant Prometheus explains in the following passage, charged with the sensuous mysticism which was one of the elements of Goethe's own ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... far astray had he put philosophy and politics under the same category. Strip the gaudy dress and trappings from an expression, and it will have a most marked result. Analysis is a terrible humiliation to your mysticism and your grandiloquence—and an awful bore to those who depend for effect on either. We have something to say hereafter on those astonishingly profound oracles whose only depth is in the terminology they employ. In the mean time, expect not too much of words. Never, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... portraiture, as a part of life, of the bestial, the cruel, the unforgiven, and feel it debasing, so must we at the idealistic end admit the representation of the celestial after human models, and feel it, even in Milton and in Dante, minimizing. The mysticism of the borderland at its supreme is a hope; at its nadir, it is a fear. We do not know. But within the narrow range of the intelligible and ordered world of art, which has been achieved by the creative reason of civilized man in his ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... not agree with him. In the presence of the possibly monstrous and the impossibly blasphemous, there is always a recourse. It is to turn away, though it be to Zeus, a belief in whom, however stupid, is ennobling beside the turpitudes that Christian mysticism produced. ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... Though the country generally returned to its old life and thought at the Restoration in 1660, much of the new life of the Commonwealth remained: congregations of Independents still met; Quaker ideals survived all persecution; and even the mysticism of Morgan Lloyd permeated the slowly awakening thought of the peasants whom, in his dreams, he saw welcoming the second ...
— A Short History of Wales • Owen M. Edwards
... theosophy and spiritualism—the mysticism of the East—have been permeating Christendom in recent years. Mme. Jean Delaire, writing in a London review, ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... bait for such as have once tasted of their philosophy." The ideas which the sect cherished were popular in a certain part of Greco-Roman society, which, sated with the luxury of the age, turned to the ascetic life and to the pursuit of mysticism. Pliny the Elder, who was on the staff of Titus at Jerusalem, appears to have been especially interested in the Jewish communists, and briefly described their doctrines in his books; and the circle for whom Josephus ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... Memoir, which has but just left my hands, I would gladly have let my brain rest for a while. The wide range of thought which belonged to the subject of the Memoir, the occasional mysticism and the frequent tendency toward it, the sweep of imagination and the sparkle of wit which kept his reader's mind on the stretch, the union of prevailing good sense with exceptional extravagances, the modest audacity of a nature that showed itself in its naked truthfulness and ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Irish emigrants, but there are other verses of "Ethna Carberry" (Mrs. Anna Johnstone MacManus) that are as fine as this. Mrs. Dora Sigerson Shorter is a balladist of stark power, and Miss Eva Gore-Booth a lyric poet whose natural lilt no preoccupation with mysticism can for more than ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... of inductive philosophy very nice. He had read something about it in Macaulay. He liked that Platonic question very much. It bordered upon poetry and mysticism Then St. Augustine! That would be charming. He had always such a love for St. Augustine! But Fenelon? The "dove of Cambrai" versus the "eagle of Meaux!" What a delightful idea! No good housekeeper, at a cheap sale, was ever so puzzled. Finally, we decided that, ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... Wallace. If we take Macaulay at the beginning of the epoch and Huxley at the end of it, we shall find that they had much in common. They were both square-jawed, simple men, greedy of controversy but scornful of sophistry, dead to mysticism but very much alive to morality; and they were both very much more under the influence of their own admirable rhetoric than they knew. Huxley, especially, was much more a literary than a scientific man. It is amusing to note that when Huxley was charged with being rhetorical, he expressed ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... mysticism of adolescence had urged her toward a monastic life. Her father almost choked with sorrow at the idea, but it was the call of religion, that religion to which she longed to devote her life! Don Benito consented to her entering a monastery in Majorca, where ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... mistaken, but he acted in good faith. No one can dispute his faults, but none can suspect the purity of his intentions. Unfortunately his royalism had in it something of mysticism and ecstasy that made of this gallant man a sort of illumine. He sincerely believed that he had received from God the mission to save the throne and the altar, and foreseeing neither difficulties nor obstacles, regarding all uncertainty and all fear as ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... powerful factor here, and the struggle between Luther and Loyola, separating the ancient from the modern in Flemish architecture, was nowhere better exemplified than in Malines. It has been said that the modern Jesuitism succeeded to the ancient mysticism without displacing it, and the installation of the first in the very sanctuary of the latter has manifested itself in the ornamentation of the ecclesiastical edifices throughout Flanders, and indeed this fact is very evident ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... he himself did. There was the indescribable misery of the age, and there were the knowledge and theories of that overburdened century, and no answer, no reply to the questions addressed to heaven and eternity; and they went to the fountains of mysticism and secret knowledge to quench the thirst of the soul. There sprung up the visionary Gnostics among the Gentiles, and the Cabalistic Mystics among the Jews. History notices the same rotation continually—idealism, sensualism, scepticism, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... sincerely, and in their way Kester and Mollie grieved, too. At Audrey's wish, Mollie wrote the full particulars of her father's death to the convent. Sister Monica's answer was, in Audrey's opinion, singularly suggestive of the ci-devant Mrs. Blake. It was a strange medley of mysticism and motherly yearnings, but at the end was a ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... one must be strong, every one perfect, every one obedient as a war horse. And it is among the most beautiful pieces of mysticism to which eternal truth is attached, that the chariot race, which Plato uses as an image of moral government, and which is indeed the most perfect type of it in any visible skill of men, should have been made by the Greeks the continual subject of their best poetry and best ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... Mysticism, which may be defined as the brooding soul of the world, cannot fail of its oracular promise as to Woman. "The mothers," "The mother of all things," are expressions of thought which lead the mind towards this side of universal growth. Whenever a mystical ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Traces of Mysticism.—Chuang Tzu, the famous philosopher of the third and fourth centuries B.C., and exponent of the Tao of Lao Tzu, has the following allusions to God, of course as seen ...
— Religions of Ancient China • Herbert A. Giles
... broke, and Talbot was waiting to hear mass before risking upon the die of a battle the English cause in Aquitaine, so wonderfully and bloodlessly redeemed in a few months. One of the last of the mediaeval knights, the ardour of his loyalty was tinged with mysticism, and any cause that he had espoused would have become holy in his eyes. He therefore raised those aged eyes now to the God of battles as he knelt in the quiet sanctuary, impatient though he was to see the vineyards and the meadows redden again with the blood ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... the Essenes were full of mysticism, parables, enigmas, and allegories. They believed in the esoteric and exoteric meanings of the Scriptures; and, as we have already said, they had a warrant for that in the Scriptures themselves. They found it in the Old Testament, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... from unity with the Tribe but from the sense of affiliation to Nature—the sense of "a world of unseen power lying behind the visible universe, a world which is the sphere, as will be seen, of magical activity and the medium of mysticism. The mystical element, the oneness and continuousness comes out very clearly in the notion of Wakonda among the Sioux Indians.... The Omahas regarded all animate and inanimate forms, all phenomena, as pervaded ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... and of sober fare upon the perspicacity of the sleeping brain was known to the ancients in times when dreams were far more highly esteemed than they now are, appears evident from various passages in the records of theurgy and mysticism. Philostratus, in his "Life of Apollonius Tyaneus," represents the latter as informing King Phraotes that "the Oneiropolists, or Interpreters of Visions, are wont never to interpret any vision till they have first ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... California has evolved with the help of this scenery and climate is a rare brew. The physical background is Anglo-Saxon of course; and it still breaks through in the prevailing Anglo-Saxon type. To this, the Celt has brought his poetry and mysticism. To it, the Latin has contributed his art instinct; and not art instinct alone but in an infinity of combinations, the dignity of the Spaniard, the spirit of the French, ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... spirit of the old consoled by the last sacrament, there sprang up a bitter enemy to the government which had closed the churches and proscribed the priests. How could a society whose spiritual life had been nourished in the solemn mysticism of the Middle Ages suddenly turn to embrace a gaudy paganism? The common self-respect of humanity was outraged by apostate priests ... as they filed before the Convention, led by the Archbishop of Paris, and accompanied by rude acolytes bearing piles of the ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... of the King, but it was not until 1872 that the complete sequence of the Idylls was given to the public. These Arthurian legends are cast by Tennyson in his most musical blank verse, and he has given to them a tinge of mysticism that seems to lift them above the everyday world into a realm of pure romance ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... and dreaming aloud the fancies of the young girl. From behind her voices also whispered them to her, the voices of her friends in the "Golden Legend," with whom she had peopled the air and the space around her. In this atmosphere she had ever lived—mysticism, in which she revelled until it seemed fact on one side, and the daily work of life on the other. ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... antiquity there were still wholly unchristian figures, which were more beautiful, harmonious, and pure than those of any Christians: e.g., Proclus. His mysticism and syncretism were things that precisely Christianity cannot reproach him with. In any case, it would be my desire to live together with such people. In comparison with them Christianity looks like some crude brutalisation, organised for the ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... training and environment—all were brought out. In that perky, retrousse-nosed, self-complacent, confidently smiling man you saw all the flippancy—so-called realism—the petty commercialism of the end of the middle of the nineteenth century. The mysticism, the poetry, the rich devotion, the lofty and large ideals of the beginning of the century—of the time that remembered Byron and produced Newman—all these things were to be seen in the rapt look of that noble, ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... edition, first published in 1971, is an unabridged and unaltered republication of the work originally published by Moffat, Yard and Company, New York, in 1917 under the title Problems of Mysticism and its Symbolism. ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... poetic independence. He remains a citizen of the West, though he chooses to dwell for a time in the East. As a rule he takes from there only what he finds congenial to his own nature. So we can understand his attitude towards mysticism. He has no love for it; it was utterly incompatible with his own habit of clear thinking. Speaking of Rumi, the prince of mystics, he doubts if this poet could give a clear account of his own doctrine;[110] the grades by which, according to Sufi-doctrine, man rises to ultimate ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... the monastery founded by St. Gall. It is only among the lower clergy that we find the traces of genuine Christian piety and intellectual activity, though frequently branded by obese prelates and obtuse magistrates with the names of mysticism and heresy. The orders of the Franciscans and Dominicans, founded in 1208 and 1215, and intended to act as clerical spies and confessors, began to fraternize in many parts of Germany with the people against the higher clergy. The people were hungry ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... young lady," the Professor condescended. "Unfortunately, your theories are wild mysticism. The veritable fiend that has plagued the house of Michell is the mischievous habit of rearing each generation from childhood to a belief in doom and witchcraft. A child will believe anything it is told. ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... Transcendentalists are persons who hold that man has the power to perceive intuitively truths which transcend the reach of the senses; but they divide, some taking the unction of Sentimentalism, and others of Mysticism. ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... which is open along its entire length, is dark and mysterious, with touches of gilding in distant corners melting away into the gloom. In the very remotest part are seated idols, and from outside one can vaguely see their clasped hands and air of rapt mysticism; in front are the altars, loaded with marvellous vases in metalwork, whence spring graceful clusters of gold and silver lotus. From the very entrance one is greeted by the sweet odor of the incense-sticks unceasingly burned by the priests ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... in his own Time and Country. He is said to have been especially hated and dreaded by the Sufis, whose Practise he ridiculed, and whose Faith amounts to little more than his own, when stript of the Mysticism and formal recognition of Islamism under which Omar would not hide. Their Poets, including Hafiz, who are (with the exception of Firdausi) the most considerable in Persia, borrowed largely, indeed, of Omar's material, but turning it to a mystical Use more convenient ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam • Omar Khayyam
... further a pearl of great price in the mysticism of Paul, which presupposes, not the Jesus of modern critics, nor yet the Jesus of the Synoptics, but a splendid heart-uplifting Jesus in the colours of mythology. In this Jesus Paul lived, and had a constant ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... hypostases, united but unequal—the One, the Intelligence, the Soul; which correspond, respectively, to the God of Plato, the God of Aristotle, the God of Zeno. Usually curt and rather dry in his utterances, Simplicius rose to a fervid eloquence as he expounded this mysticism of Alexandria. Not that he accepted it as the final truth, it was merely a step, though an important one, towards that entire and absolute knowledge of which he believed that a glimpse had been vouchsafed to him, even to him, in his more sublime hours. As ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... difficult to know him; but it seemed to Philip, looking back, that there had been in him a tragic force, which sought vainly to express itself in painting. He was a man of unusual character, mystical after the fashion of a time that had no leaning to mysticism, who was impatient with life because he found himself unable to say the things which the obscure impulses of his heart suggested. His intellect was not fashioned to the uses of the spirit. It was not surprising that he felt a deep sympathy with the Greek who had devised a new technique to express ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... entirely the handiwork of artisans belonging to the conquered races, and many traces of Byzantine, and even after the Crusades, of Norman and Gothic design, are recognizable in Moslem architecture. But the Orientalism of the conquerors and their common faith, tinged with the poetry and philosophic mysticism of the Arab, stamped these works of Copts, Syrians, and Greeks with an unmistakable character of their own, neither Byzantine nor ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... Nineveh, and the Egyptian civilization of old Thebes to that {177} which developed later, there is evidence of progress. The religious life lost a good many of its crudities, abolished human sacrifice, and developed a refined mysticism which was more elevating than the ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... new drug, mineral, or herb,—"things of price"—"blue flowering borage, the Aleppo sort," or "Judaea's gum-tragacanth." But Karshish has much of the temper of Browning himself: these technicalities are the garb of a deep underlying mysticism. This man's flesh so admirably made by God is yet but the earthly prison for "that puff of vapour from his mouth, man's soul." The case of Lazarus, though at once, as a matter of course, referred to the recognised medical categories, ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... Bernard did not hesitate to attack even Gilbert de la Porree, Bishop of Poictiers, an avowed Realist, who attempted to explain the Trinity. In fact, St. Bernard represents the reaction from Scholasticism, which took the form of Mysticism, that is, the purely contemplative attitude towards the verities of the Christian creed. In this he was followed with much greater extravagance by the school which found its home in the great abbey of St. Victor—Hugh (1097-1143), who formulated the ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... that. The truth of much that he said appealed to the lofty-minded and serious; his dry cynicism, savage dislike of civilization, and frank affection for Nature, attracted others. He hit hard, but he never resented rough knocks in return, and no man had seen him out of temper with anything but mysticism and the art bred therefrom. Upon the whole, however, his materialism annoyed more ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... blossomed in the luxuriant if slightly formal garden of her intellect. The world she looked upon was a world, as Adams had once said, "seen through the haze of a golden temperament"—the dream of an imaginative mysticism, of a conventual purity, a dream which is to the reality as the soul of a man is to the body. And it was this inspired divination, this luminous idealism, which had caused Adams to exclaim when he ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... far surpassed Wesley: he was a man of letters equal to the greatest writers of prose his native country had brought forth. The Catholic Reaction of the Nineteenth Century claims its place in literature, thanks to this incomparable talent, side by side with the German mysticism of Carlyle, the devout liberalism of Tennyson, the lyric Utopias of Shelley, and the robust optimism of Browning. Newman is ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... Harmony Society naturally crystallized under the preaching and during the life of Father Rapp. It has some features of German mysticism, grafted upon a practical application of the Christian ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... the development of Hebrew out of Chaldean and Egyptian conceptions, pp. 44, etc.; also pp. 127 et seq. For the early view in India and Persia, see citations from the Vedas and the Zend-Avesta in Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth, chap. i. For the Egyptian view, see Champollion; also Lenormant, Histoire Ancienne, Maspero, and others. As to the figures of the heavens upon the ceilings of Egyptian temples, see Maspero, Archeologie Egyptienne, Paris, 1890; ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... [Footnote: Diog. Laert., Lives of Phil.] All this is unintelligible or indefinite. We cannot comprehend how the number theory will account for the production of corporeal magnitude any easier than we can identify monads with mathematical points. But underlying this mysticism is the thought that there prevails in the phenomena of nature a rational order, harmony, and conformity to law, and that these laws can be represented by numbers. Number or harmony is the principle of the universe, and order holds together the world. Like ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... occasion, at the metropolitan mosque of Balbek, I was holding forth, by way of admonition to a congregation cold and dead at heart, and not to be moved from the materialism of this world into the paths of mysticism. I perceived that the spirit of my discourse was making no impression, nor were the sparks of my enthusiasm likely to strike fire into their humid wood. I grew weary of instructing brutes, and of holding up a mirror to an assembly of the blind; but ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... of this study of Nature Mysticism, and the methods adopted for attaining them, are sufficiently described in the introductory chapter. It may be said, by way of special preface, that the nature mystic here portrayed is essentially a "modern." He is assumed to have accepted the fundamentals of the hypothesis of ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... thought of the riddles of that tower, far less of the early Christianity of the isle of saints, of which these ruins and their wild legend were the only vestiges, nor of the mysticism that planted clusters of churches in sevens as analogous to the seven stars of the Apocalypse. Even the rugged glories of the landscape chiefly addressed themselves to her as good to sketch, her highest flight in admiration of the picturesque. In the state of mind ascribed to the ancients, ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... coming together to choose their king, resolve on a pilgrimage to Mount Kaf, to pay their homage to the Simorg. From this poem, written five hundred years ago, we cite the following passage, as a proof of the identity of mysticism in all periods. The tone is quite modern. In the fable, the birds were soon weary of the length and difficulties of the way, and at last almost all gave out. Three only persevered, and arrived before the throne ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... persecutions and tragical events with which they too long perplexed their followers, and disturbed the repose of Europe. The Thomists, and the Scotists, the Occamites, and many others, soared into the regions of mysticism. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... conscious action of Robert de Borron, who well understood the character of his material, and radically remodelled the whole on the basis of the triple Mystery tradition translated into terms of high Christian Mysticism. A notable feature of Borron's version is his utilization of the tradition of the final Messianic Feast, in combination with his Eucharistic symbolism, a combination thoroughly ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... at Hull-House we were, however, in no danger of losing ourselves in mazes of speculation or mysticism, and there was shrewd penetration in a compliment I received from one of our Scotch neighbors. He came down Polk Street as I was standing near the foundations of our new gymnasium, and in response to his friendly remark ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... book. Since I had become acquainted with him I had read others of his writings, especially his book on England, and had found that he improved greatly on acquaintance. I think that he has confined his mysticism to the book above named. In conversation he is very clear, and by no means above the small practical things of the world. He would, I fancy, know as well what interest he ought to receive for his money as though he were no philosopher, and I am inclined to think ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... of his friend Maurice resting upon him with a questioning glance, and it was as if the thought of his heart were laid bare. Philip made a strong effort, and fixed his look and his attention upon the speaker, who was deep in oriental mysticism. ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... fully agree with you about that; and there is a great deal of very objectionable nonsense which goes by the name of mysticism, which is merely emotion divorced ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... these two great results: 1st, That an order of ideas has been established, which all deep philosophy has demanded, even when it could not make good its claim. This postulate is fulfilled. 2ndly, The postulate is fulfilled without mysticism or Platonic reveries. Ideas, however indispensable to human needs, and even to the connection of our thoughts, which came to us from nobody knew whence, must for ever have been suspicious; and, as ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... changeless systems of the universe, as revealed in astronomy or in chemistry, something too of the truth about life, what we animals really are, what our place and what our powers, a truth ungarbled whether by prudery or mysticism. ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... Indus to the valley of the Ganges, and from Ceylon to the Himalayas; thence it traversed China, and its conquests seem to have been permanent. The religion of Buddha is so far different from that of Confucius, and so far resembles Christianity, that it combines mysticism with asceticism—a practical rule of personal conduct with a consistent transcendentalism. It has, moreover, the great advantage of possessing a highly fascinating and romantic gospel, or biography, of its founder. Gautama, as the hero of Arnold's "Light of Asia," ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... much truer one, viz. this, that unless we trust to Christ and take our illumination from Him, we shall never behold a whole set of truths which, when once we trust Him, are all plain and clear to us. It is no mysticism to say that. What do you know about God?—I put emphasis upon the word 'know'—What do you know about Him, however much you may argue and speculate and think probable, and fear, and hope, and question, about Him? What do you know about Him apart from Jesus Christ? ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... that served them to read romances, for romances were read aloud, and not only with the eyes[382]; their voice more melodious than a bird's song. In short, from the time of Edward II. that mixture of mysticism and sensuality appears which was to become one of the characteristics of ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... he knew that he was waiting for someone. He shrugged. Mysticism was not even interesting to him, ordinarily. Still, though a behaviorist, he upheld certain instinctual motivation theories. And, though reluctantly, he granted Freud contributory significance. He could be an atavist, a victim of unconscious regression. Or a prey of some insidious ...
— Strange Alliance • Bryce Walton
... is not confined within this narrow circle. Fourierism, Saint Simonism, Commonism, agrarianism, anti-rentism, mysticism, sentimentalism, false philanthropy, affected aspirations for a chimerical equality and fraternity; questions relative to luxury, wages, machinery; to the pretended tyranny of capital; to colonies, outlets, population; to emigration, ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... already in existence, had it lined with marble, and set up Siva in its midst. The study of the faith which I had adopted, the holding of spiritualistic seances and matters of that sort, occupied my time, and I became more and more imbued with the strange mysticism of my belief. As the years flew by I was more and more firmly convinced that what looks like mere wood is in reality imbued with strange and awful qualities. I shall never forget that terrible evening when Siva first ...
— A Master of Mysteries • L. T. Meade
... virile common sense of that most brilliant young writer, Miss Rebecca West, in her bitter onslaught on feminine limitations in the opening chapters of "The World's Worst Failure." The former is an extravagance of sexual mysticism. Man can never understand women. Women always hide deep and wonderful things away beyond masculine discovery. Men do not even suspect. Some day, perhaps—It is someone peeping from behind a curtain, and inviting men in provocative tones ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... economy is not confined to this narrow circle. Fourierism, Saint-Simonism, communism, mysticism, sentimentalism, false philanthropy, affected aspirations to equality and chimerical fraternity, questions relative to luxury, to salaries, to machines, to the pretended tyranny of capital, to distant territorial acquisitions, to outlets, to conquests, to population, ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat
... before Wagner's time with such works as Bach's Grand Mass in B minor, or Beethoven's Mass in D, we will readily see that the composers of those times put their best thought into their sacred compositions. Bach, Protestant that he was, but with the vein of religious mysticism strong in him, which is usually to be found in highly endowed artistic natures (Wagner is an instance, also Liszt), was attracted by the beautiful text of the Mass, its stateliness and solemnity, and the world is enriched by an imperishable work of genius. It ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... drapery, gentle undulations, summer-cloud floatings, soft, sinuous movements, the fluency of pliant forms, the willowy bend and rebound of lithe and lovely suppleness. It is grace generic,—the sublime, the evanescent mysticism of motion, without use, without aim, except its own overflowing and all-sufficing fascination. But when a man dances, it reminds me of that amusing French book called "Le Diable Boiteux," which has been or may be free-thinkingly translated, "The Devil on Two Sticks." In saying this, I design ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... package out of the bag. It made a slight sound. When he saw the roll of banknotes in his hand, I observed the extraordinary gleam on his face. All the sentiments of love were there, adoration, mysticism, and also brutal love, a sort of supernatural ecstasy and the gross satisfaction that was already tasting immediate joys. Yes, all the loves impressed themselves for a moment on the profound humanity of this ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... has a European grip of things; of politics and literature and finance. Needless to say, I have discovered his cloven hoof; I make it my business to discover such things; one may (or may not) respect people for their virtues, one loves them only for their faults. It is a singular tinge of mysticism and credulity which runs through his nature. Can it be the commercial Genoese, the gambling instinct? For he is an authority on stocks and shares, and a passionate card-player into the bargain. Gambling and religion ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... There was no hurry now for me about anything in life. I could dream as I pleased, having nothing else to do; the evenings were my own. If possible, too, I would see and arrive at some feeling of respect for the sacredness of the church and terror of the dead; I had still a memory of that rich mysticism from days now far, far behind, and wished I could have some share in it again. Now, perhaps, when I found that nail, there would come a voice from the tombs: "That is mine!" and I would drop the thing in horror, and take to my ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... Mysticism rests essentially on two modes of mental life—feeling, which we need not study; and imagination, which, in the present instance, represents the intellectual factor. Whether the part of consciousness that this state of mind requires and permits be imaginative in nature ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... in check by his vigorous common-sense, there was in Mr. Lincoln's nature a strong vein of poetry and mysticism. That morning he told his cabinet a strange story of a dream that he had had the night before—a dream which he said came to him before great events. He had dreamed it before the battles of Antietam, ...
— The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln • Helen Nicolay
... very wonderful bunch of such. He was in the house for nearly half an hour, and when he emerged, the notebook in his breast pocket, had there been an eye to read it, would have been seen to be filled with stranger details in regard to Oriental mysticism than even Mr. Yahi-Bahi had given to the world. So strange were they that before the Philippine chauffeur returned to the Rasselyer-Brown residence he telegraphed certain and sundry parts of them to New York. But why he should have addressed them to the head of a detective bureau instead of to a ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... worry," which is briefly, Don't! Thirdly, that enlightened by this spirit of scientific straightforwardness, man is ceasing to seek for mental truth by means of roundabout metaphysical or conventional ethical methods (based on old traditions and mysticism), and is looking directly in himself, or materially, for what Immaterialism or Idealism has really never explained at all—his discoveries having been within a few years much more valuable that all that a priori philosophy or psychology ever yielded since the beginning. And, finally, that ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... brother's individuality which always impressed me was his restrained, but genuine, mysticism. In the few accounts of his life that I have read I do not remember any allusion to this characteristic. That he possessed it, however, and this to no usual degree, seems to my mind quite patent; in fact, it was this suggestion of mysticism that first attracted ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... a "Mystic" because he preaches a doctrine of Intuition. But his metaphysical Intuition bears no relation to the mysticism of the saint or of the fervid religious mind. He expressly says, "The doctrine I hold is a protest against mysticism since it professes to reconstruct the bridge (broken since Kant) between metaphysics and ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... to Mary Taylor to question this mysticism; she all at once understood—perhaps read the riddle in the dark, melancholy eyes that so ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... Jasper, with his heaps and heaps of money. Mr. Jasper would consider himself sold. But Novalis, not so very long ago, understood.... A dead girl more real than all earth. You mustn't suppose it to be mere mysticism." ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... look here, Mary, I have done some dreaming in my time, it is true, for so far the world has been a place of tribulation to me, and it is sick hearts that dream. But I mean to give it up, for I know as well as you do that there is only one end to all these systems of mysticism." Mary ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... that moment all her untamed mysticism swayed her—"like I was going along the tracks in the dark and something is coming—something like that ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... intelligible to you, I will add, too, that she was a person of the most infectious gaiety and carelessness and that intelligent, good sort of frivolity which is only found in good-natured, light-hearted people with brains. Can one talk of mysticism, spiritualism, a turn for presentiment, or anything of that sort, in this case? She used to laugh ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... perceptions, and emotions, which were never yet brought together in the case of the individual before us. We are accustomed to regard these surprising performances of animals as manifestations of what we call instinct, and the mysticism of natural philosophy has ever shown a predilection for this theme; but if we regard instinct as the outcome of the memory or reproductive power of organised substance, and if we ascribe a memory to the race as we already ascribe it to the individual, then ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... was a synonym for arrogance. The pride of its opponents was touched. Alarming indeed, and transcendental beyond conception, were the outpourings of thought that anointed the Dial and these Essays. The very chrism of mysticism trickled along their running-titles, and dripped fragrantly from their pages. Not only new opinions, but new words and phrases, puzzled the uninitiated. Among these were subjective and objective, and the concise, comprehensive Germanisms were assailed ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... of Rinaldo to Riccardo; and ruthlessly swept his pen through all the flatteries, direct and indirect, which he had originally bestowed upon the house of Este. There is hardly a single stanza that is not changed. But in the process of revision he deprived his poem of all life. Religious mysticism has been substituted for the refined chivalry of the Crusades, and poetry and romance have been sacrificed for classical regularity and religious orthodoxy. To any one familiar with the original, the Conquistata must be regarded as the ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... has long been recognized philosophically, being in reality the Oversoul spoken of by Emerson, but only recently has it been recognized scientifically." The French scientist pointed out that from the superconsciousness come inspiration, genius, moral values. "Belief in this is not mysticism though it recognized and valued the qualities which ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... the Butterfly, an addition to the classical myth of Arachne, the spider. The four hymns in praise of Love and Beauty, Heavenly Love and Heavenly Beauty, are also stately and noble poems, but by reason of their abstractness and the Platonic mysticism which they express, are less generally pleasing than the others mentioned. Allegory and mysticism had no natural affiliation with Spenser's genius. He was a seer of visions, of images full, brilliant, and distinct, and not like Bunyan, Dante, or Hawthorne, a projector ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... was a great genius, as is shown by his power of style.... His Journal is a book in which the thoughts of many hearts are revealed.... There are strange forms of mysticism, which the poetical intellect takes. I suppose we must not try to explain them. Amiel was a Neo-Platonist and a skeptic ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the pitch of mysticism, the imagination harassed and goaded beyond the normal round, suddenly flipping from the circumference, spinning off at a tangent, out into the void, where all things seemed possible, hurtling through the dark there, ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... religious morality by the old belief that God, the most powerful of warriors, is polygamous, that he has reserved all maidens for himself, and that men can only take those whom he has left. This belief, although traces of it exist in several metaphors of mysticism, is abandoned to-day, by most civilised peoples. However, it still dominates the education of girls not only among our believers, but even among our free-thinkers, who, as a rule, think freely for the reason that they ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... customs relative to the naming of things are all founded on the same idea of the potency and mysticism inherent in a name, which may be found in the legends of the old Egyptians, wherein the power of the great king and god Ra depended on the fact that no one knew his real name, until Isis by stratagem got it from him; ...
— Folk-lore in Borneo - A Sketch • William Henry Furness
... after his imagination; and his mind, his ideals and, as MacMaster believed, even his personal ethics, had to the last been colored by the trend of his early training. There was in him alike the freshness and spontaneity, the frank brutality and the religious mysticism, which lay well back of the fifteenth century. In the Marriage of Phaedra MacMaster found the ultimate expression of this spirit, the final word as to Treffinger's ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... affinities between them. Elizabeth, for example, although perhaps not so habitually sticky as The Kid, like her didn't seem able to remain clean or tidy for longer than half an hour at a time. Also, Elizabeth believing in Signs, The Kid revered her for her mysticism—about the only person who ever did. She used to beg to be allowed to study her Dream Book, and every evening before bedtime would go into the kitchen and—sitting amid that wild disorder that is necessary to Elizabeth before she can really feel ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... that cry beyond reason and conviction, that cry of Lamb when he cried, "We would indict our dreams!" or of Stevenson, "Shall we never shed blood?" In short he is not a humorist, but a great wit, almost as great as Voltaire. Humour is akin to agnosticism, which is only the negative side of mysticism. But pure wit is akin to Puritanism; to the perfect and painful consciousness of the final fact in the universe. Very briefly, the man who sees the consistency in things is a wit—and a Calvinist. The man who sees the inconsistency in things is a ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... into Dogmas? I do not indicate a solution; I do not express an opinion. I call attention to a fact in the world of scholarship that will not be without its decided reaction upon the plain man. But the study of the ancient Gnosis, and indeed of mysticism generally, has left another suggestion that seems laden with limitless possibilities. Let us first go back to what I said as to the communication of certain "processes," "leavenings," or "energisings" under a sacramental veil. These processes ...
— The Gnosis of the Light • F. Lamplugh
... divine Man, the master, Christos, restored to the heart of Humanity from the mysticism and miracle of monks and theologies, from the superstitions and folklore ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... I think of that Spot, the more I am convinced that there are things in this world that go beyond science. On no scientific grounds can that Spot be explained. It's psychic phenomena, or mysticism, or something of that sort, I guess, with a lot of Theosophy thrown in. The Klondike is a good country. I might have been there yet, and become a millionaire, if it hadn't been for Spot. He got on my nerves. ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... natural origin of this consecrated symbol, while discovering that it is based on the sacredness of numbers, and this in turn on the structure and necessary relations of the human body, thus disowning the meaningless mysticism that Joseph de Maistre and his disciples have advocated, let us on the other hand be equally on our guard against accepting the material facts which underlie these beliefs as their deepest foundation and their exhaustive explanation. That were ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... readers: Neither mysticism and pietism, nor dogmatism alone are able to sustain the Protestant churches. Mysticism and pietism yield to more consistent Catholicism; dogmatism, without symbolical books, which lose their authority where the press is free, succumbs ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... Mordred's treachery) well under control, and with a constant succession of adventures, culminating in the greatest of all, the Quest of the Graal or Sangreal itself. Although there are passages of great beauty, the excessive mysticism, the straggling conduct of the story, and the extravagant praise of virginity in and for itself, in the early Graal history, have offended some readers. In the Merlin proper the incompleteness, the disproportionate space given to mere ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... has always been, will forever remain, a crime; but Germany organised it as she did everything. She made a code for murder and conflagration, and over it all she poured the boiling oil of an enraged mysticism, made up of Bismarck, of Nietzsche, and of the Bible. In order to crush the world and regenerate it, the Super-Man and Christ were mobilised. The regeneration began in Belgium—a thousand years from now ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... restrained by other demands, is not exempt from danger. We may be carried away by the attraction peculiar to these noble studies, withdraw into antiquity and fall into a species of historical mysticism which ends in the affirmation, that whatever has been is true, absolutely, and which, instead of confining itself to the explanation of transitory phenomena, invests them with all the dignity of principles. We ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... this conviction to be classed as idealism, or ecclesiasticism, or mysticism, or anything else to which we can put a tag. It is not sectarian; it is not peculiarly Christian. It is the general possession of mankind. True, it is easier for the Christian than for any other to enter on this heritage, since his spiritual descent ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... was like a holy mission that he imposed upon himself, that of redeeming and saving the convict's daughter. And his head was so full of certain theories and arguments, that he did not tell himself these things in simple fashion, but became lost in perfect social mysticism; imagining rehabilitation in the form of an apotheosis in which he pictured Miette seated on a throne, at the end of the Cours Sauvaire, while the whole town prostrated itself before her, entreating her pardon and singing her praises. Happily he forgot all these fine things as soon as Miette jumped ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola |
