"Negation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... motion actual or imagined; and with respect to these the expression of repose is greater in proportion to the amount and sublimity of the action which is not taking place, as well as to the intensity of the negation of it. Thus we speak not of repose in a stone, because the motion of a stone has nothing in it of energy nor vitality, neither its repose of stability. But having once seen a great rock come down a mountain side, we have a noble ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... "permanence." M, like the Latin ab or ex, indicates "motion from." R expresses "uncertainty" or "incompleteness," and is employed to convert a statement into a question, or a relative pronoun into one of inquiry. G, like the Greek a or anti, generally signifies "opposition" or "negation;" ca is, as aforesaid, intensitive, and is employed, for example, to convert afi, "to breathe," into cafi, "to speak." Cr is by itself an interjection of abhorrence or disgust; in composition it indicates detestation or destruction: thus, craky signifies "hatred;" ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... position of our Ego towards others, merely considered AS others, and of all the Egos merely 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 ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... been a player without a part, Annoyed that even the sun should have the skies For such a flaming way to advertise; He may have been a painter sick at heart With Nature's toiling for a new surprise; He may have been a cynic, who now, for all Of anything divine that his effete Negation may have tasted, Saw truth in his own image, rather small, Forbore to fever the ephemeral, Found any barren height a good retreat From any swarming street, And in the sun saw power superbly wasted; And when the primitive old-fashioned stars Came out again to shine ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... Apollyon, but an occult prophecy concerning the great conqueror of Europe! nothing can be plainer! Of course the first letter, N, stands for nothing—a mere veil to cover the prophecy till the time of revealing. In all languages it is the sign of negation—no, and none, and never, and nothing; therefore cast it away as the nothing it is. Then what have you left but apoleon! Throw away another letter, and what have you but poleon! Throw away letter after letter, and what ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... stir—desolate, in fact. What if I should tell you that it bubbles, like a caldron over the bottomless pit, with griefs and sins!—that in lives condemned to perpetual imprisonment on these bare rocks, feeding on themselves, traits intensifying, the loneliness, the labor, the negation, slowly extract the juices of humanity, and make crime a matter to be whispered of among them? If they feel they are forgotten by God, what matters the murder or the suicide more or less that gives release? It is hell here or hell there: they are sure ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... 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
... high up in the cycles of eternity. Who can fail, as Prof. Browne says, to be attracted by him? 'His sorrowful and persecuted life; his purity of conduct and youth; his courage and uncomplaining patience under misfortune; his complete self-negation; the dim ideal of a better state of things which can be discerned through the obscure mystic utterances of the Bayán; but most of all his tragic death, all serve to enlist our sympathies on behalf of ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... sympathies and love, of the contemplation of extended prosperity and concord, of hope for international fraternity and peace, and for a life beyond the grave. Happiness to the highly civilized will consist, therefore, of the surplus of these pleasures over the pains of their negation. ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... and Hetty smiled at Cheyne as she took her place; but the man made a little gesture of negation when Mrs. Schuyler ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... Through all her sweetness, all her dignity, all her high-souled negation of self which I had known, and which never seemed more marked than now—through all the fire that seemed to shine from the dark depths of her eyes into my very soul, pride shone conspicuously. The pride that has faith; the ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... was made to discover the north-eastern passage. The enthusiasm of Barendz had died with him, and it may be said that the stern negation by which this supreme attempt to solve the mystery of the pole was met was its best practical result. Certainly all visions of a circumpolar sea blessed with a gentle atmosphere and eternal tranquillity, and offering a smooth and easy passage ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... not stately and classic as in the age preceding, but instinct with a new sort of life. The profoundest themes which can occupy the mind of man were handled with marvellous lightness of touch and clothed with prismatic brilliancy of speech; but all was negation. None tried to build; all to demolish. The black-winged angel of Destruction was hovering ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... the common charities of life. Sins of commission in that awful indictment are not even referred to. By what we have not done, BY SINS OF OMISSION, we are judged. It could not be otherwise. For the withholding of love is the negation of the spirit of Christ, the proof that we never knew Him, that for us He lived in vain. It means that He suggested nothing in all our thoughts, that He inspired nothing in all our lives, that we were not once near enough ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... 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
... his idea. He knows barely enough to be aware that with much wisdom cometh much sorrow; therefore, no Pierian spring, no tree of knowledge, thank you all the same. He is right enough as he is; the perpetual sabbath of absolute negation is good enough for him. His motto is, 'Happy the bird that has no history.' Once a day, he experiences a crisp, triumphant appetite, which differs from hunger as melody differs from discord; then he slowly half-unveils his currant-like eyes, and selects from the finny multitudes swimming around ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... be very strange. Instead of this, the house, gloomy and sparsely furnished as it was, was clean and in order. It lacked everything to make it pleasant—air, sunshine, and any cheerful token of comfort; but it was only in this dreary negation that it failed; there was no positive fault to be found even with the atmosphere of the kitchen and bare lobby through which he was conducted, and he discovered, to his surprise, that he was to be entertained in a small parlour, which had a round polished centre table, on which lay ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... at that rate be the greatest artist. A house or sign painter might instantly enter the lists with Michael Angelo, and might look down on the little, dry, hard manner of Raphael. But grandeur depends on a distinct principle of its own, not on a negation of the parts; and as it does not arise from their omission, so neither is it incompatible with their insertion or the highest finishing. In fact, an artist may give the minute particulars of any object one by one and with the utmost care, and totally neglect the proportions, arrangement, ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... 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 ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... 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 the house arguing ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... siege, took possession of the soul of the laird. He had made a huge fire, and had heaped up beside it great store of fuel, but, though his body was warm and likely to be warm, his soul inside it felt the ravaging cold outside—remorseless, and full of mock, the ghastly power of negation and unmaking. He had got together all the screens he could find, and with them inclosed the fireplace, so that they sat in a citadel within a fortress. By the fire he had placed for his lordship the antique brocade-covered sofa, ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... 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 ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... present, himself dimorphous, for both a 'left'-minded and a 'right'-minded Hegel can always be quoted, has best explained the contradictions of life, of history and of the spirit, with his own magic formula. Thesis: affirmation; Antithesis: negation; Synthesis: comprehension! Young man, or rather, comparatively young man! You began life by accepting everything, then went on to denying everything on principle. Now end your life by comprehending everything. ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... to whom it seems axiomatic or "natural." It has often been declared absurd that sex honor, especially for women, should be made to depend on a negative. It seems to make an ascetic and arbitrary standard for everyday life. In fact, however, the negation is imposed by the nature of the sex passion and by the conditions of human life. The passion tends to excess. What is "natural" is therefore evil. Negation, restraint, renunciation, are imposed by expediency. Perhaps ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... 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, the King put on a milder countenance, and calling him to a cupboard conferred privately with ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... no tenderness—none at least by him recognizable as such. All the women he came in contact with were his grandmother and Betty. He had no recollection of having ever been kissed. From the darkness and negation of such an embryo-existence, his nature had been unconsciously striving to escape—struggling to get from below ground into the sunlit air—sighing after a freedom he could not have defined, the freedom that comes, not of independence, but of love—not of ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... images of sensations. Men have never been able to express anything but what they felt. Thus everything has become metaphor; everywhere the soul is enlightened, the heart burns, the mind wanders. Among all peoples the infinite has been the negation of the finite; immensity the negation of measure. It is evident that our five senses have produced all languages, as well as all our ideas. The least imperfect are like the laws: those in which there is the least that is arbitrary ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... "not" when forming part of a sentence, and "no" when used as an answer to a question, is "ne". When used as a sentence-negative, it usually immediately precedes the verb. For emphatic negation of some other word than the verb, ...
— A Complete Grammar of Esperanto • Ivy Kellerman
... by the finite," an opinion which reminds us of Hobbes' old theory of "glorying over others." The difference between their views and that of most authorities is not so great as it at first appears; they admit a "negation" of truth and beauty, but found the ludicrous, not upon this, but upon the rebirth which follows. This step in advance, taken in accordance with their general philosophy, may be correct, but it does not seem warranted ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... interconfounding uproars more augment the brawl—nor the waves of the blown Baltic with their clubbed sounds —than their opposite (Silence her sacred self) is multiplied and rendered more intense by numbers, and by sympathy. She too hath her deeps, that call unto deeps. Negation itself hath a positive more and less; and closed eyes would seem to obscure ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... shook his head with a quick jerk of negation. "They are gone. Behind them remains only death—much death—" And the bleakness of his thoughts ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... that God "hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling." He then proceeds to trace this happy condition to its sources. He begins with a negation. The antecedent cause of our salvation and calling was not our works; we were not treated according to our works; not after the measure, the proportion, the merit or demerit of our works: these might have brought punishment, ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... basilisk, the dragon—and sometimes discussed in a supplementary chapter by the current zoologies, under the idea of heraldic and apocryphal natural history. When asked, therefore, whether Ceylon is Taprobane, the true answer is, not by affirmation simply, nor by negation simply, but by both at once; it is, and it is not. Taprobane includes much of what belongs to Ceylon, but also more, and also less. And this case is a type of many others standing in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... plant, surrounded by darkness, stretches itself, as it were on tiptoe, to find its way out into the light, so when death suddenly throws the darkness of negation round the soul it tries and tries to rise into the light of affirmation. And what other sorrow is comparable to the state wherein darkness prevents the finding of a way ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... is something anyone can be. O white negation of the thing it is! O golden-haired moon-cold loveliness! Too cold! too cold! and love as cold as he. Love wanders through the memories of his vice As through a labyrinth, in sad madness glad, And now calls on his name and bids him rise, And now ...
— Antinous: A Poem • Fernando Antonio Nogueira Pessoa
... obedience; and there were 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 chivalry he was generally ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... representatives of enormous corporate wealth have themselves been responsible for a portion of the conditions against which Bryanism is in ignorant revolt. I do not believe that it is wise or safe for us as a party to take refuge in mere negation and to say that there are no evils to be corrected. It seems to me that our attitude should be one of correcting the evils and thereby showing that, whereas the Populists, Socialists, and others really do not correct the ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... without mischief. Far from listening to the King's intended rebuke, as what the levity of her conduct had justly deserved, she extenuated, nay, defended as a harmless frolic, that which she was accused of. She denied, indeed, with many a pretty form of negation, that she had directed Nectabanus absolutely to entice the knight farther than the brink of the Mount on which he kept watch—and, indeed, this was so far true, that she had not designed Sir Kenneth to be introduced into her tent—and then, eloquent in urging her own defence, ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... think I know everything," replied Helen, with something suspiciously like a sob, while her aunt broke her pledge to the extent of shaking her head with a gesture of negation. "It—it makes it worse for me. I dare not bid him go away, and I grow horribly ashamed because—because it hurts one to be conscious of so heavy a debt. Besides, he is consoling ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... Hlestakov grown old, but my fate is a far more serious one. Before time was, by some decree which I could never make out, I was pre-destined 'to deny' and yet I am genuinely good-hearted and not at all inclined to negation. 'No, you must go and deny, without denial there's no criticism and what would a journal be without a column of criticism?' Without criticism it would be nothing but one 'hosannah.' But nothing but hosannah is not enough for life, ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... slim but powerful limbs, to admire her long, delicate feet and hands, the strong womanly face, with its kindly mouth and soft, almost affectionate eyes. Tallente, who for the last ten years had looked upon the other sex as non-existent, crushed into an uninteresting negation for him owing to his wife's cold and shadowy existence, twice within the last few months found himself pass in a different way under the greatest spell in life. Nora Miall had provoked his curiosity, had reawakened a dormant sense of sex without attracting it towards ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... creates artificial logic, and all those formulas 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, creates nothing; it supposes an ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... husband should have wished to hear said of his wife. The fact 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 never yet ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... from now, even if our rules are founded on the keenest scrutiny of the "standard" writers of our time. Usage is varied as our way of thinking changes. In Chaucer's time two or three negatives were used to strengthen a negation; as, "Ther nas no man nowher so vertuous" (There never was no man nowhere so virtuous). And Shakespeare used good English when he said more elder ("Merchant of Venice") and most unkindest ("Julius Caesar"); but this ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... the positive and aggressive attitude toward life, the ethics of action, rather than the ethics of negation, that must control the modern business world, and that may make our modern business man the most potent factor for good in ...
— The business career in its public relations • Albert Shaw
... we have cited,—the one reconciling the conscience with the cowardice of the North, and the other conceding the arrogant pretensions of the South,—the negation of the power of the central government over Slavery was carried into effect. By a legislative hocus-pocus, known as the Compromise Measures of 1850, Congress, contrary to the uniform tendency of bodies entrusted with a discretion, vacated instead ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... 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 idea in ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... gained so cheaply as by withdrawing attention from evidence, and declining the fatigue of comparing probabilities. The most pertinacious and vehement demonstrator may be wearied in time by continual negation; and incredulity, which an old poet, in his address to Raleigh, calls the wit of fools, obtunds the argument which it cannot answer, as woolsacks deaden arrows though ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... eyes of Van Laer held in them a shallowness and murderous cruelty, an expression of negation and coldness combined with mind such as one finds nowhere in the animal kingdom, save that branch of it which prides itself on its likeness to God. His thumbs were cruelly shaped and enormous. A man may disguise his soul, he may disguise his mind, he may disguise his face, but ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... regimenting in great barracks of laboratories. It is the absolute negation of the spirit of initiative of spontaneity and it is above all the negation of the spirit of protest ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... be believed in, not demonstrated. Everybody rates them highly, and thinks that whatever he chose to do would be done in a first-rate manner. Is it his love of disappointing complacent expectancy which has gone so far as to keep up this lamentable negation, and made him resolve not to write the comprehensive work which he would have written if nobody had expected it ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... to perceive that between the Civil War and the crusade that is now upon us, we were under the evil spell of materialism. Now materialism is the very negation of democracy, which is a government by the demos, or over-soul; it is equally the negation of joy, the negation of reverence, and it is without conviction because it cannot believe even in itself. Reflecting thus, he ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... leaped high and subsided, and with it the cobra leaped and sank low upon its coils. From the people a mighty shout of negation went up, so that the walls rang with it, and the echoes were bandied back and forth, insensibly decreasing through many minutes. When all was still the Voice began to chant again, and the flames blazed higher and brighter, ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... him, a gesture that conveyed the full strength of negation. "We are on opposite sides of a line across which friendship is impossible. I could not be your friend without being false to myself. You couldn't be mine unless you were by some accident flung into the working class and forced to adopt ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... Things in their fundamental nature cannot be named or explained: they are beyond the range of language and perception: they have no signs of distinction but possess absolute sameness (samata). From this totality of things nothing can be excluded and to it nothing can be added. Yet it is also sunyata, negation or the void, because it cannot be said to possess any of the attributes of the world we live in: neither existence nor non-existence, nor unity nor plurality can be predicted of it. According to the celebrated formula of Nagarjuna known as the eight Nos ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... conclusion that they must be rational, she had been accustomed to put the question, not at all as a purely perfunctory marital civility, but, as she shyly admitted to herself, because it was so sweet to hear Jack's negation and see the love-light in the eyes that soon brought her, fascinated and fluttering, to be folded in his arms a moment. Later still, so confident had she become in her dominion, both knock and query were abandoned, and, ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... New Comedy arose out of a mere negation, the abolition, viz., of the old political freedom, we may easily conceive that there would be an interval of fluctuating, and tentative efforts to supply its place, before a new comic form could be developed and fully established. Hence there may have been ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... wonder; Primrose had been a wife, though only seventeen, these three months; in another three was to be a mother. Her eyes, blue as her friend's, showed an even greater assurance, because it was based on positives and not on a mere negation. Dark-circled as those eyes were, her glance, as it passed over Loveday, was the more merciless, because it came from behind ...
— The White Riband - A Young Female's Folly • Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse
... claims that the astrology of to-day is once more a revelation of the Chaldean and Assyrian religions. But polytheism—whether in its gross form of many gods, of planetary angels, or in the more subtle form of pantheism,—is the very negation of sane religion; and astrology is the negation of ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... hand, lurks in 'indolence,' or, to speak more accurately, in our present employment of it! This, from 'in' and 'doleo,' not to grieve, is properly a state in which we have no grief or pain; and employed as we now employ it, suggests to us that indulgence in sloth constitutes for us the truest negation of pain. Now no one would wish to deny that 'pain' and 'pains' are often nearly allied; but yet these pains hand us over to true pleasures; while indolence is so far from yielding that good which it is so forward to promise, that Cowper spoke only truth, when, perhaps meaning to witness against ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... of apprehending him, by way of negation, denying all the imperfections of the creatures, and removing them at an infinite distance from him. And truly, though this be an imperfection in knowledge, yet it is the greatest knowledge we can attain to, ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... been against him from the first, he thought, and there flashed through his mind the dark panorama, the accumulating disasters of the night. A negation lay upon his existence that would not be lifted. It had followed him like a sinister shadow for years to this obscure, black smother of water, to the Gar reeling crazily forward under an impotent hand. The yacht was behaving heroically; no other ketch ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... necessary. Acquiescence or dissent may indeed be tacitly conveyed, by holding up the hand, or by ballot, without condescending to offer any verbal reasons for the adoption or rejection of the proposed measure. Affirmation or negation does not in any manner constitute Thought; such determination may result from caprice, from ignorance, or from prejudice, without the slightest consideration. Thought requires some proposition clearly conceived and perspicuously expressed in a sentence; and the ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... head in negation, saying, "When one at my age makes a desperate resolution, it's because there is no other recourse. A man who, like myself, has spent his youth and his mature years toiling for the future of himself and his sons; a man who has been submissive to every wish of his superiors, ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... inoperative on the life of the country. One reason perhaps is that Balzac wrote from his head rather than from his heart. Whatever may be, in other respects, the superiority of the Realistic over the Romantic school of fiction, it is inferior in this, viz., that its emotiveness tends to the negation, not to the affirmation, of action. One cannot but recollect to the novelist's disadvantage, as applying to this reference, the following statement he made to Madame Hanska for another purpose: "I have never in my life confused the thoughts of my heart with those of ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... false; and to speak of true falsehood, as Theaetetus does (Theaet.), is a contradiction in terms. The fallacy to us is ridiculous and transparent,—no better than those which Plato satirizes in the Euthydemus. It is a confusion of falsehood and negation, from which Plato himself is not entirely free. Instead of saying, 'This is not in accordance with facts,' 'This is proved by experience to be false,' and from such examples forming a general notion of falsehood, the mind ...
— Sophist • Plato
... but she longed to do some honour to the one man who would have promoted her nearly vanished scheme, and this work she trusted to offer for a vestment to be used at his burial Mass. Many a cherished plan was resigned, many an act of self-negation uttered, as she bent over the dainty web; many an entreaty breathed, that her moment's wandering of fancy might not be reckoned against her, but that she might be aided to keep the promise of her infancy, and devote herself undivided to the direct ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... I am so plain—so very, very plain," she said to herself, as if uttering the negation of ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... within the room had turned to blackness, not the darkness of night, in which objects are seen dimly, for I could see clearly and without difficulty. But it was the negation of light; objects were presented to my eyes, if I may say so, without any medium, in such a manner that if there had been a prism in the room I should have seen no ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... mechanical and automatic action can represent them, but their perfect reproduction can only take place on the basis of a liberty akin to that of the Originating Spirit itself, which therefore implies the liberty of negation ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... affords a better basis for deduction than an empirical correlation ascertained only by accumulated observations. Premising that by rational correlation is not meant one in which we can trace, or think we can trace, a design, but one of which the negation is inconceivable (and this is the species of correlation which Cuvier's principle implies); then we hold that our knowledge of the correlation is of a more certain kind than where it is simply inductive. We think that Professor Huxley, in his anxiety ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... a limited number of primary impressions. Of these primary impressions there are only four—red, yellow, green, and blue, together with white and black. White is a collective effect, whilst black is the antithesis of white and the very negation of colour. The first four are called primary colours, for no human eye ever detected in them two different colours, while all of the other colours contain two or more primary colours. If we mix the following tints of the spectrum, i.e. the following rays ...
— The Chemistry of Hat Manufacturing - Lectures Delivered Before the Hat Manufacturers' Association • Watson Smith
... not do to war with the world: the world is too strong for the individual." Goethe only gives a more philosophic form to this counsel when he remarks of the poet, "He put himself into a false position by his assaults on Church and State. His discontent ends in negation.... If I call bad bad, what do I gain? But if I call good bad, I do mischief." The answer is obvious: as long as men call bad good, there is a call for iconoclasts: half the reforms of the world have begun ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... United States, directly or indirectly, to exclude slavery from the Territories of the Union. The Supreme Court of the United States have given a negative answer to this proposition, and it shall be my first effort to support that negation by argument, independently of the authority ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... language is so concrete, that often, when I have supposed a word had been dissected and traced to its root, subsequent attention has proved it to be a compound. Thus verbs have been inserted with pronouns, or with particles, indicating negation, or the past or future tense, when it has been supposed they had been divested of these appendages. I am now going over the work the third time. The simplest forms of the verb seem to be the first and third persons singular ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... the head was decided enough to settle any question, but Belasez fancied she caught a momentary flash in her eyes which was by no means a negation. ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... that her sons might follow some business that did not involve lying, cheating, and a hard, grinding selfishness, would be arrant nonsense. In this way man has been moulding woman to his ideas by direct and positive influences, while she, if not a negation, has used indirect means to control him, and in most cases developed the very characteristics both in him and herself that needed repression. And now man himself stands appalled at the results of his own excesses, and mourns in bitterness ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... I conceive then infinity and perfection; that is not less certain; for I should not have the idea of a limit if I did not conceive of infinity, and the word imperfect would have no meaning for me, if I could not imagine perfection, of which imperfection is but the negation. Starting from this point, the philosopher proves by a series of reasonings that the conception of perfection by our minds demonstrates the real existence of that perfection: God is. He adds, that the existence of God is more certain than the most certain ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... "command by negation" concept evolved in the 1980s in order to deal with the rapidity of the air/missile threat and the need to integrate dynamically the offensive and defensive missile, air, sea, and undersea capabilities of a battle group and its joint components (e.g., AWACs). This ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... is perfectly indifferent and fifth-rate compared to that of the instincts: strictly speaking, the whole concept of intellectual causality is false. To reduce being a Christian, the state of Christianity, to an acceptance of truth, to a mere phenomenon of consciousness, is to formulate the negation of Christianity. In fact, there are no Christians. The "Christian"—he who for two thousand years has passed as a Christian—is simply a psychological self-delusion. Closely examined, it appears that, despite all his "faith," he has been ruled only by his instincts—and what instincts!—In ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... perhaps, 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
... sufficient differentia of mysticism, has often produced intensity and depth, but it is, nevertheless, a mark of the limitation of this type of religion. The indescribable and undifferentiated character of mystical experience is no doubt partly responsible for the emphatic place which negation has held in mysticism. The experience itself, which seems like "a flight of the alone to the Alone," can be told in no words except those of negation. "The mortal limit of the self" seems loosed, and the soul seems merged into that which it forever seeks but ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... has been obscured; and Mr. Browning has meant us from the first to see it struggling through them. But in so doing he has judged Sordello's poetic life as a blind aspiration after the spiritual, while the egotism which he represents as the keynote of his poetic being was in fact the negation of it. The idea was just: that the greatest poet must have in him the making of the largest man. His Sordello is imperial among men for the one moment in which his song is in sympathy with human life; and Mr. Browning would have made it more consistently ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... I say, are here found, according to Indian doctrines, entirely external to the true God of India, or Brahma in the neuter gender. Brahma is alone, unchangeable in the midst of creation: all emanates from him, he comprehends all, but he remains extraneous to all: he is Being and the negation of beings. Brahma is never worshipped; the indeterminate Being is never invoked; he is inaccessible to the prayers as the actions of man; humanity, as well as nature, is extraneous to him. External to Brahma rises the Trimurti, that is to say, Brahma (masculine) ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... into crime so heinous? Again Shakespeare strips the Idea bare: their trespass comes through ambition, "last infirmity of noble minds," under the blinding persuasion of witchcraft, which (an actual belief in Shakespeare's time) is a direct negation of the moral law, and puts Satan in place ...
— Poetry • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... face overlooking all the countryside, with subtle flickers of laughter running athwart its wonted contortions, more weird and sinister in this ghastly glare than by day? And what significance might attend these strange machinations? Revolving the idea, he presently shook his head in conclusive negation as he rode along. The approach of raiders was silent and noiseless and secret. Whatever the mystery might portend it was not thus that they would advertise their presence, promoting the escape of the objects of their search. ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... undivided, debt of gratitude. Neither Engel Freund nor John Hecker professed any religious faith. The latter was never in the habit of attending any place of worship. Both were Lutheran so far as their antecedents could make them so, but neither seems to have practically known much beyond the flat negation, or at best the simple disregard, of Christianity to which Protestantism leads more or less quickly according as the logical faculty is more or less developed in those whose minds have been fed upon it. However, there was nothing aggressive in the attitude of either toward ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... be if this infinite were by negative privation or privative negation of the end, as it is for a more positive affirmation of the end, infinite ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... gained by being in France was, learning to be better satisfied with my own country. Time may be employed to more advantage from nineteen to twenty-four almost in any way than in travelling; when you set travelling against mere negation, against doing nothing, it is better to be sure; but how much more would a young man improve were he to study during those years. Indeed, if a young man is wild, and must run after women and bad company, it is better this should be done abroad, as, on his return, he can break off ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... any one daring to answer the melamed—the perfect pious and Rabbi Todros's right hand—was unheard of and astonishing; it was more, because in the answer there was a negation of his judgment. Therefore the melamed's convex eyes nearly sprang from their sockets. They opened widely and covered Meir's pale face with ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... bullet-shaped, 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
... thirty. If it live on, one remedy is, of course, the scientific attitude; that attitude which is bent on considering and discovering the relations of things among themselves, not their personal relation to us. The study of science is a priceless discipline in self-abnegation, but only in negation; it looses us from self, it does not link us to others. The real and natural remedy for the egotism of youth is Life, not necessarily the haunting of cafes, or even the watching of football matches, but strenuous activity in the simplest human relations of daily happenings. ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... attributes they do not designate any part of the thing itself. God cannot have positive attributes because he has no essence different from his existence for the attributes to designate, and surely no accidents. Negative attributes are of value in leading us to a knowledge of God, because in negation no plurality is involved. So when we have proved that there is a being beside these sensible and intelligible things, and we say he is existent, we mean that his non-existence is unthinkable. In the same way living means not dead; incorporeal is negative; eternal signifies not caused; ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... be more, or wanted should be had. But Shakespeare is very uncertain in his use of negatives. It nay be necessary once to observe, that in our language two negatives did not originally affirm, but strengthen the negation. This mode of speech was in time changed, but as the change was made in opposition to long custom, it proceeded gradually, and uniformity was not obtained ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... correct representation of the terms, we have to inquire, where lies the alleged incompatibility of prescience and freedom? Between freedom and necessity there is, we admit, an absolute and irreconcilable discrepancy and opposition; for the assertion of the one is a direct negation of the other. What is free cannot be necessitated, and what is necessitated cannot be free. But prescience involves no such opposition. For simple knowledge is not coercive; it is not impulse; it is not influence of any kind: it is merely acquaintance with truth, or the mind's ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... she could no longer medicine her despair by turning it into fiction, she knew at once that she must somehow transpose it into terms of action, that she must always escape from life into more life, and not into its negation. ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... I had a secret from him which I guarded to the end. I believe he never suspected it, though of this I'm not absolutely sure. If he had so much as an inkling the line he had taken, the line of absolute negation of the matter to himself, shows an immense effort of the will. I may at last lay bare my secret, giving it for what it is worth; now that the main sufferer has gone, that he has begun to be alluded to as one of the famous early dead and that his wife ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... He that believes in the divine right of Bishops believes in the divine authority of the Christian religion. Therefore, Sir, a Jacobite is neither an Atheist nor a Deist. That cannot be said of a Whig; for Whiggism is a negation of all principle[1277].' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... that formerly I had some difficulty in sharing the supreme respect for infinite Being which animates so many saints: it seemed to me the dazed, the empty, the deluded side of spirituality. Why rest in an object which can be redeemed from blank negation only by a blank intensity? But time has taught me not to despise any form of vital imagination, any discipline which may achieve perfection after any kind. Intuition is a broadly based activity; it engages elaborate organs and sums up and ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... on the other side, on the other hand.] Counter Evidence — N. counter evidence; evidence on the other side, evidence on the other hand; conflicting evidence, contradictory evidence, opposing evidence; disproof, refutation &c 479; negation &c 536. plea &c 617; vindication &c 937; counter protest; 'tu quoque' argument; other side of the shield, other side of the coin, reverse of the shield. V. countervail, oppose; mitigate against; rebut &c (refute) 479; subvert &c (destroy) 162; cheek, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... connected with a definite sexual object. In the second case it is a question whether the manifold accidental influences suffice to explain the acquisition unless there is something in the individual to meet them half way. The negation of this last factor is inadmissible according ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... do not need to do anything to blind yourselves. Simple negation is fatal. 'If a man love not'; that is all. The absence ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... attributed the endlessly sad declension of her darling brother. Once on her face I surprised a look of unutterable sorrow resting on Charley's; but the moment she saw that I observed her, the look died out, and her face stiffened into its usual dulness and negation. On me she turned only the unenlightened disc of her soul. Mrs Osborne, whom I seldom saw, behaved with much more kindness, though hardly more cordiality. It was only that she allowed her bright indulgence for Charley ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... was in Dwight Herbert's leather chair and she lolled at her ease. It was strange to see this woman, usually so erect and tense, now actually lolling, as if lolling were the positive, the vital, and her ordinary rigidity a negation of her. In some corresponding orgy of leisure and liberation, Lulu sat down with ...
— Miss Lulu Bett • Zona Gale
... for indeed, the affectation which arises from vanity is nearer to truth than the other, as it hath not that violent repugnancy of nature to struggle with, which that of the hypocrite hath. It may be likewise noted, that affectation doth not imply an absolute negation of those qualities which are affected; and, therefore, though, when it proceeds from hypocrisy, it be nearly allied to deceit; yet when it comes from vanity only, it partakes of the nature of ostentation: for instance, the affectation of liberality ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... strike at the very foundations of Christendom; that a few thousands of pagans, more or less, suffered and perished, was of small importance, compared with the maintenance of this elemental principal. First conquer and then convert, was his maxim. His thesis constitutes the very negation of Christianity. ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... pass over into reality, if it 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
... I had felt myself drawn very much towards the venerable missionary. His gentleness, yet firmness of manner, his utter negation of self and devotedness to his Master's cause were very remarkable. His tender love for his daughter, too, was very beautiful. She returned it with the deepest affection and devotion. Accustomed as I had been to the endearments of a happy, well-ordered ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... considerations vanished, all at once, and like an extinguisher, fell on him that awful sensation of negation. ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... She possesses—as Michael does, to a less degree—at least a few natural traits; her conscience is not quite dead, and her love is strong, although even this is represented as a huge deformity, driving her to the negation of that womanhood to which it should belong. Single scenes, too, if seen or read in isolation from the main body of the play, have a certain individual strength, giving us glimpses of the workings ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... 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 ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... Jesus and Mohammed in propagating the Bible. But if the universalism they achieved held faulty elements, is that any reason why the purer truth should shrink from universalization? Has Judaism less future than Buddhism—that religion of negation and monkery—whose sacred classics enjoin the Bhiksu to camp in and contemplate a cemetery? Has it less inspiration and optimism than that apocalyptic vision of the ultimate victory of Good which consoles the disciples of Zoroaster? ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... That negation of interest in any given new thing which is not only allowable but commendable, if we are to preserve the outlines of our identity from the violence of alien intrusion, becomes a sheer waste of energy when it is transmuted into ponderous ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... either that such Good is unattainable—and in that case why should we idly pursue it?—or that we believe we shall attain it under some other conditions of existence. And according as we adopt one or the other position—so it seems to me—our attitude towards life will be one of affirmation or of negation." ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... 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 ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... Naturally man tended to lose his sense of scale and relation. A straight line, or a combination of straight lines, may have still a sort of artistic unity, but what can be done in art with a series of negative symbols? Even if the negative were continuous, the artist might express at least a negation; but supposing that Omar's kinetic analogy of the ball and the players turned out to be a scientific formula!—supposing that the highest scientific authority, in order to obtain any unity at all, had to resort to the Middle Ages for an imaginary demon to sort his atoms!—how ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... of mimicry and express emotions; tics of the ear or auditory tics; nictitation and vision tics, particularly of the eyelids; tics of sniffing; tics of sucking; tics of licking; tics of biting and of mastication, and mental trismus; tics of nodding, tossing, affirmation, negation, salutation and mental torticollis; trunk, arm and shoulder tics; snatching tics; the professional or occupational spasms, which are really a special atypical form of tics; walking and leaping tics; tics of spitting, swallowing, vomiting, ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... Will are thus connected,] what in the Intellectual operation is Affirmation and Negation that in the Will is Pursuit and Avoidance, And so, since Moral Virtue is a State apt to exercise Moral Choice and Moral Choice is Will consequent on deliberation, the Reason must be true and the Will right, to constitute good Moral Choice, and what the ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... doesn't it, this late afternoon hour? I've wanted to say it since the other night when, through poor Jack's folly of revenge and blindness, we were all put into such an ugly muddle, at such ugly cross-purposes." She paused here and Valerie, giving neither assent nor negation, said: ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... of God. He never forgot to take pleasure in a bird as it flashed past him, or a drop of water, as it fell from his finger: he was, perhaps, the happiest of the sons of men. Yet this man undoubtedly founded his whole polity on the negation of what we think the most imperious necessities; in his three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, he denied to himself and those he loved most, property, love, and liberty. Why was it that the ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... the prejudices of the majority. Even when they are geographically concentrated, like the Irish, they may fail to obtain their wishes, because they arouse some hostility or some instinct of domination in the majority. Such a state of affairs is the negation ...
— Political Ideals • Bertrand Russell
... trouble in distinguishing the pupils of the teachers holding this view. They will be found to exhibit the most negative mental condition—a natural result of absorbing the constant suggestion of "nothingness"—the gospel of negation. In marked contrast to the mental condition of the students, however, will be observed the mental attitude of the teachers, who are almost uniformly examples of vital, positive, mental force, capable of hurling their teaching into the minds ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... indifferens'—in the same sense in which heat may be designated as the indifference between light and gravity. And what is the Reason?—The spirit in its presence to the understanding abstractedly from its presence in the will,—nay, in many, during the negation of the latter. The spirit present to man, but not appropriated by him, is the reason of man:—the reason in the process of its identification with the will is ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... expression 'poetic contents' by others—in opposition to works which only offer an harmonic and rhythmic play of tones. Writers on aesthetics of our day declaim against the latter term; with good reason, if it refer to programme-music; without reason, if they extend their negation to all Beethoven's music, and deny its poetic contents. Whence that tendency, which so frequently manifests itself, and that strong desire to give pictorial explanations, especially of the Beethoven symphonies and sonatas, if they contained nothing but a ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... 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 is the ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... than mere negation in your look, your voice, my child. It is pride, wounded pride, that speaks; and it is as if you told me that I had less care for your pride than you had, and thought less ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... opinion would be folly and sacrilege. Rome, merciful toward conquered nations, though binding them in chains, spared their lives; slaves are the most fertile source of her wealth; freedom of the nations would be the negation of her rights and the ruin of her finances. Rome, in fact, enveloped in the pleasures and gorged with the spoils of the universe, is kept alive by victory and government; her luxury and her pleasures are the price of her conquests: she can neither abdicate ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... 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, as the result ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... little word of four letters, yet you will find in me a preposition, a negation, and an exclamation. I am as old as the sun, and he could not possibly fulfill his daily course without me. I am a rest to the weary laborer, and a delight to school-children, who greet me with a shout of ...
— Harper's Young People, May 11, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... too light to struggle and to suffer withered like crushed flowers. Thus the principle of death descended slowly and without shock from the head to the bowels. Instead of having the enthusiasm of evil we had only the negation of the good; instead of despair, insensibility. Children of fifteen seated listlessly under flowering shrubs, conversed for pastime on subjects which would have made shudder with terror the motionless ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... entree into her society, Stephen had, unquestionably, impressed her the more favorably. For a time he seemed too far removed from her; and she failed to experience that sense of proportion between them so necessary for mutual regard. Perhaps it was due to this negation, or perhaps it was owing to her modest reserve, or perhaps to both, that whatever familiar intercourse, sympathy or affinity ought to have existed was naturally excluded. True friendship requires a certain equality, or at least a feeling of proportion between those ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... Under pretext of painting a picture of economic doctrine, we are given its caricature. Such has never been the system, to the elaboration of which the purest hearts and noblest intellects have devoted themselves. A negation does not constitute ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... 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 ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... 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
... Nietzsche, a Stendhal, a Gobineau. Liberty and equality are terms mutually destructive, they cannot exist together; for, given liberty, the strong instantly look to it that equality shall perish. And rightly so. Equality is a war cry for fools—a negation of nature, an abortion. The very ants know better. Doubtless you view with considerable distrust the growing spirit of democracy, or what is called ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... informing, and when he had done Edwin could see that the shape of the hall depended on the shape of the house, and that halls had only been crushed and pulled into something long and narrow because the disposition of houses absolutely demanded this ugly negation of the very idea of a hall. Again, he had to begin to think afresh, to see afresh. He conceived a real admiration for Osmond Orgreave; not more for his original and yet common-sense manner of regarding things, than for his aristocratic deportment, his equality to every situation, and ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... without an intelligence it was not, and could not be by evolution, for creation by evolution could not, and can not be; because that which is not in a thing can not be evolved out of it, unless you can get more out of a thing than there is in it; which is absurd. So evolution is a negation of the doctrine of a creation. And the doctrine that there is nothing but matter, and that matter is eternal, is a denial of creation by intelligence or otherwise. The infidel says, life began to be; for there was a time when there was no life. But they say matter is eternal. ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 9. September, 1880 • Various
... friendship beyond question. Well, my good fellow, if you should ever have need of discretion, understand that there are two sorts of discretion—the active and the negative. Negative discretion is that of fools who make use of silence, negation, an air of refusal, the discretion of locked doors—mere impotence! Active discretion proceeds by affirmation. Suppose at the club this evening I were to say: 'Upon my word of honor the golden-eyed was not worth all she cost me!' Everybody would ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... disrepute. 'Plato,' said Blake, 'knew of nothing but the virtues and vices, and good and evil. There is nothing in all that. Everything is good in God's eyes.' And this is the perpetual burden of his teaching. 'Satan's empire is the empire of nothing'; there is no such thing as evil—it is a mere 'negation.' And the 'moral virtues,' which attempt to discriminate between right and wrong, are the idlest of delusions; they are merely 'allegories and dissimulations,' they 'do not exist.' Such was one of the most fundamental of ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... the foe of class pretension and oppression; he is the friend of friendless children; the reformer of those whom society has made vagrants. Without many clear assertions of Christian doctrine, but with no negation of it, he believes in doing good for its own sake,—in self-denial, in the rewards which virtue gives herself. His faults are few and venial. His merry life smacks too much of the practical joke and the punch-bowl; he denounces cant in the self-appointed ministers of the gospel, ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... smile, making a sign of negation with her head, but he began to press her until his importunities and his ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... here)—that his words, "because you did not apply them," contained the gist of the whole matter;—that the application of them, or any other things, was precisely the essence of design; the non- application, or wrong application, the negation of design: that his use of the poor materials was in this case admirable; and that if he could explain to me, in clear words, the principles on which he had so used them, he would be doing a very great service to ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... already intimated, Pantheism is the negation of the Divine Personality in order to arrive at Unity; Polytheism is the negation of the Divine Unity, which is fractioned and divided that its multitudinous action may be conceived. The light fancy was delighted with such divisions, resulting in varied gods and goddesses; but the soul could find ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... for a supramundane 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 Ethic." ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... have, darling," he answered quickly, seizing the opening, "and as soon as you consent I shall begin to make it ready. It is folly," he added hurriedly, as if to forestall any negation, "for us to go on this way any longer. I want you, darling, and I want a home. Life to me, with you buried here, is only desolation, and how much so to you, the past five months can only tell. I know how you feel toward ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... refusals, for her wonder. Wonder, indeed, she did, and much more than that. The thought sat upon her like a brooding evil spirit, frayed her nerves to waste. He used to move her so much by this policy of negation that she found herself panting as she sat among her women; or when from her throned seat at table she saw his pale profile burn like a silver coin in the dusk, the pain of her heart's beating well-nigh made her ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... fullest facility and harmony by providing the Chancellor with no colleagues, and by making that official responsible solely to the Emperor. Such a scheme would have meant, obviously, a thoroughgoing centralization in all Imperial affairs and the utter negation of anything in the way of a parliamentary system of government. The more liberal members of the constituent Reichstag compelled (p. 214) a modification of the original Bismarckian programme; so that when the constitution assumed its permanent form it contained not ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... then crying out in my undisciplined way that the task was too hard for me; that I loathed my life; that it was impossible to live any longer without love and appreciation and sympathy; that so uncongenial an atmosphere could be no home to me; that the world was an utter negation and a mockery. ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... giving daily extracts from ancient history. This was the Convent de la Visitation. Its pious nuns had taken the vow never to look upon the face of man. If, as they paced under the great oaks of their close, or the stately length of their cloisters telling their beads, or meditating on the negation of earthly existence and the perfect joys of the future, they heard an echo of the conflict that was shaking Europe, it was only to utter a prayer that the souls of those who had obeyed the call of their country and fallen gloriously as Frenchmen ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton |
