"Philosophizing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... direction he finds himself led - and here we meet with a special attribute of Reid's whole philosophical outlook - to the realm of human speech. For speech depends upon an inner, intelligent human activity, which, once learnt, becomes a lasting part of man's being, quite outside the realm of his philosophizing consciousness, and yet forming an indispensable instrument for ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... understand the opposite of analysis—the one resolving into its elements what the other compounds. If so, the synthesis of the Chippewa language is clearly, to my mind, homogeneous and of a piece—a perfect unity, in fact It seems to be, all along, the result of one kind of reasoning, or thinking, or philosophizing. If, therefore, by the term "polysynthetic," which Mr. Duponceau, in 1819, introduced for the class of Indian languages, it be meant that its grammar consists of many syntheses, or plans of thought, it did not appear to me that the Chippewa was polysynthetic. But this I could not state to ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... then another. Zosephine no longer lifted to heaven a mutinous and aggrieved countenance. Bonaventure was often nigh, and his words were a deep comfort. Yet often, too, her spirit flashed impatience through her eyes when in the childish philosophizing of which he was so fond he put forward—though ever so impersonally and counting himself least of all to have attained—the precepts of self-conquest and abnegation. And then as the flash passed away, with a moisture of the eye repudiated by the pride of ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... of the night. Sleepy servants were cleaning up, but Fox vowed that they should bring us yet another bottle before going home. So down we sat about the famous old round table, Fox fingering the dents the gold had made in the board, and philosophizing; and reciting Orlando Furioso in the Italian, and Herodotus in the original Greek. Suddenly casting his eyes about, they fell upon an ungainly form stretched on a lounge, that made ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... tell the story of a nation like ours in a nutshell, requires a peculiar faculty for selecting, condensing, and philosophizing. The brevity with which he relates the principal events in American history, does not detract from the charming interest of ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... and the rest. There is not one literary flourish in the whole of them, although they are done with consummate literary care; nothing but honest, if not always accurate, observation of the world of hill-slopes, waves, flowers, birds, and beasts, and honest, shrewd philosophizing as to what it all meant for him, an American. Here is a man content to take a walk, fill his mind with observation, and then come home to think. Repeat the walk, repeat or vary the observation, change or expand the thought, and you have Thoreau. No wonder he ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... at my little craft snugly ensconced upon the top of a pile of barrels, and smiled as I turned away, thinking how precious she had already become to me, and philosophizing upon the strange genus, man, who could so readily twine his affections about an inanimate object. Upon consideration, it did not seem so strange a thing, however, for did not this boat represent the work of brains and hands for a generation past? Was it not the ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... foundation for personal reactions, e.g., criticisms, interpretation, moralizing, personal philosophizing, or as mere facts entertainingly told: the idea ...
— A Guide to Methods and Observation in History - Studies in High School Observation • Calvin Olin Davis
... expressing his suspicions of him generally, the writer goes on to say—"I would you had him closely watched. For he is a general disliker of us and of our doings; he is gathering together an enormous treasure, and he makes an open jest of our literary pursuits. You, for instance, he calls a philosophizing old woman, and me a dissolute buffoon and scamp. Consider what you would have done. For my part, I bear the fellow no ill will; but again, I say, take care that he does not do a mischief to ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... in stout new boots, and as the trunks were not brought up, there was no remedy; so having smoothed my hair as well as I could, and repeatedly twitched my obdurate collar, I proceeded to clomp down the two flights of stairs, philosophizing as I went; and with some difficulty found my way into the room where Mrs. Bloomfield ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... between the two! Socrates, dying without a pain, without disgrace, easily sustains his part to the last. The death of Socrates, philosophizing with his friends, is the mildest that could be desired. That of Jesus, expiring in torments, injured, mocked, cursed by all the people, is the most horrible that can be feared. Socrates, taking the impoisoned cup, blesses him who ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880
... "that's the captain who stood up in the sutler's hut without his boots." He recognized the agreeable, philosophizing voice with pleasure. ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... away with much of the capital we want for machines; but somehow we make good. We shoulder a load we needn't carry and hit the pace up hot. If we got clean control, I reckon we'd never stop. However, there's not much use in philosophizing when you've lost your job, and the East-bound train goes out in a few minutes. You'd better pack ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss
... happy, in the search after truth, to have so great an ally as yourself, and one who is so great a friend of the truth itself. It is really pitiful that there are so few who seek truth, and who do not pursue a perverse method of philosophizing. But this is not the place to mourn over the miseries of our times, but to congratulate you on your splendid discoveries in confirmation of truth. I shall read your book to the end, sure of finding much that is excellent in it. I shall do so with the more pleasure, because I have been ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... the world and he'll take us all out of it," said the clown, philosophizing. "That's about all we ought to expect 'im to do. I don't think God 'as anything to do with matrimony. He says, 'you takes your choice and you trusts to luck, not to me. If it turns out all right,' says ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... be commonplace if turned into prose. Verse cannot contain the refining subtle thoughts which a great prose writer embodies; the rhyme eternally cripples it; it properly deals with the common problems of human nature, which are now hackneyed, and not with the nice and philosophizing corollaries which may be drawn from them. Thus, though it would seem at first a paradox, commonplace is more the element of poetry than ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... fellow-pedant Democritus (whose principles he stole verbatim), and to tell his disciples there never was a wise man in the world besides himself, but also to put it in writing how Colotes performed adoration to him, as he was one day philosophizing, by touching his knees, and that his own brother Neocles was used from a child to say, "There neither is, nor ever was in the world, a wiser man than Epicurus," and that his mother had just so many atoms within her as, when coming together, must have produced a complete wise man? May ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... "Cicero loved philosophizing better than philosophy," said Aram, coldly; "but surely, my Lord, the affections give us pain as well as pleasure. The doubt, the dread, the restlessness of love,—surely these prevent the passion from constituting a happy state of mind; to me one knowledge alone seems ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... commendation. Wagg was plainly having a particularly good time on this outing. He displayed the contentment of a man who had ceased to worry about the future; he was taking it easy, like a vacationer with plenty of money in the bank. On one occasion he did mention the money in the course of a bit of philosophizing ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... with the fact that they invariably speak of redemption, not in connection with Christ's death alone, but emphatically in connection with the group of ideas, his incarnation, death, descent, resurrection, and ascension! For the most part, they received it by tradition as a fact, without much philosophizing, that, in consequence of the sin of Adam, all men were doomed to die, that is, to leave their bodies and descend into the shadowy realm of death. They also accepted it as a fact, without much attempt at theoretical explanation, that when Christ, the sinless and resistless Son of God, died and ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... contemplation of these thy relations to me, the finite, I will be calm and blessed. I know immediately, only what I must do. This will I perform undisturbed and joyful, and without philosophizing. For it is thy voice which commands me, it is the ordination of the spiritual world-plan concerning me, and the power by which I perform it is thy power. Whatsoever is commanded me by that voice, whatsoever is accomplished by this power, is surely and ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... sublime morality of which he only has given us both precept and example? The greatest wisdom was made known amidst the most bigoted fanaticism, and the simplicity of the most heroic virtues did honor to the vilest people on the earth. The death of Socrates, peaceably philosophizing with his friends, appears the most agreeable that could be wished for; that of Jesus, expiring in the midst of agonizing pains, abused, insulted, cursed by a whole nation, is the most horrible that could be feared. Socrates, in receiving the cup of poison, ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... the claim be granted, the R[a]ma sects do but continue his work, we shall begin by following out the result of his teaching as it was interpreted by his disciples; especially since the Krishnaites have left to the Ramaites most of the philosophizing of the church, and devoted themselves more exclusively to the moralities and immoralities of their more practical religion. As a matter of fact, the Ramaites to-day are less religious than philosophical, while in the case of the Krishnaites, with some reservations, the contrary ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... Essay on Government. This gave me much to think about. I saw that Macaulay's conception of the logic of politics was erroneous; that he stood up for the empirical mode of treating political phenomena, against the philosophical; that even in physical science his notions of philosophizing might have recognised Kepler, but would have excluded Newton and Laplace. But I could not help feeling, that though the tone was unbecoming (an error for which the writer, at a later period, made the most ample and honourable amends), there was truth in several of his strictures ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... He was in no mood to stand Gallito's philosophizing, and the Spaniard, seeing it, smiled as he scratched Lolita's head. "Two people can not be thrown much together and not show to each other what is in them," he continued. "You know that my daughter is proud," he lifted his own head haughtily here, ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... [alarmed] What! You are going back from your word. [To Don Juan] And all your philosophizing has been nothing but a mask for proselytizing! [To the Statue] Have you forgotten already the hideous dulness from which I am offering you a refuge here? [To Don Juan] And does your demonstration of the approaching ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... shape to win again. I've always distrusted him, and I've always kept an eye on him. When he came into Fraser County and stooped low enough to buy old Ike Pettit, I thought it time to strike. You read a lot about courage in politics in such newspapers as these that have been philosophizing about me at long range. Well, I'm not going to brag about myself, but it required some courage on my part to take the initiative and read the riot act to Thatcher. I've done what men are sometimes praised for doing; but I don't ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... hero, that it will all come out right at the end,—that Philip will marry Charlotte, and have a good income, while the poor soul is wrestling with the res augusta domi. Dickens and Thackeray seemed to draw from each other in their later works; the former philosophizing more in his Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend, and the latter attempting more of the descriptive in The Newcomes and Philip. Of minor pieces we may mention his Rebecca and Rowena, and his Kickleburys ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... newspapers of America stop futile philosophizing upon the merits and demerits of each case, let them measurably cease their comment upon what each side has accomplished or failed to accomplish during the tragic four months which have traced their ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... thought, Owen delivered himself of the sentiment that 'people's papas and mammas were very funny,' doubtless philosophizing on the inconsistency of the class in being, some so willing, some so reluctant, to leave their children behind them. Honor fully agreed with him, but did not think the discussion profitable for Robin, whom she now proposed to take home in the pony-carriage. Lucilla, ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in its representative, Aristotle, met in the martyr of Nola an opponent vigilant, earnest, powerful. And while the legitimate prosecution of the former mode of philosophizing has led to deism, skepticism, atheism, and materialism, it is to those who have retained in methods, more mathematically clear and more perfectly developed than that which Bruno disseminated, but still bearing, as their key-note, the one great idea of his bold crusade,—to those we must look for ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... while we are philosophizing and offering advice so wisely, Jane is at work—doing the best she knows how. We can't claim the honor ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... be laid evidentially, logically. The notion to the contrary is thoroughly democratic; the mob is the most ruthless of tyrants; it is always in a democratic society that heresy and felony tend to be most constantly confused. One hears without surprise of a Bismarck philosophizing placidly (at least in his old age) upon the delusion of Socialism and of a Frederick the Great playing the hose of his cynicism upon the absolutism that was almost identical with his own person, but men in the mass ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... are those who consider it dispraise of a philosopher to suggest that his work has local color. However that may be, William James thought as an American as certainly as Plato thought as a Greek. His way of philosophizing was one that belonged to the land ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... Planets round their Axes, made with a view to determine whether the Earth's diurnal motion is perfectly equable. Here the question is a difficult and a remote one, and the method adopted for its solution is perfectly suitable in principle. It marks a step onward from mere observations to philosophizing upon their results. In practical astronomy, too, we note an advance. Not only are his results given, but also careful estimates of the errors to be feared in them, and a discussion of the sources of such errors. The same volume of the Philosophical ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... Arulenus Rusticus for being a philosopher and for calling Thrasea sacred, and Herennius Senecio because in his long career he had stood for no office after the quaestorship and because he had compiled the life of Helvidius Priscus. Many others also perished as a result of this same charge of philosophizing, and all remaining members of that profession were again driven from Rome. One Juventius Celsus, however, who had been conspicuous in conspiring with certain persons against Domitian and had been accused ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio
... must own I did not find them so accusing when I could study them in their contemplation of some more important subject than myself. One such occasion for philosophizing them distinctly offered itself to my chance witness when an event of the last seriousness had called some hundreds of them together. One sees strong faces elsewhere; I have seen them assembled especially ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... good deal about this to Jone, and he says I'm getting to be a philosopher; but I don't think it takes much philosophizing to find out how this case stands. If house service could be looked upon in the proper way, it wouldn't take long for American girls who have to work for their living to find out that it's a lot better to live with nice people, and cook and wait on the table, and do all those ...
— Pomona's Travels - A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former - Handmaiden • Frank R. Stockton
... method of exact investigation and the scientific principle of forming conclusions upon abundant data. Naturally, theories of society were held long before any science came into existence, but they were of value only as philosophizing. Some of these theories were published and attracted the attention of thoughtful persons, but they did not affect social life. Some of them developed into philosophies of history, based on the preconceived ideas of their ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... went about among his patients, wearing his usual cheery smile, speaking the usual comforting word, smoking, philosophizing, rallying his friends, satirizing his enemies, genial, independent, inscrutable as ever. He never called at Wardour Place, of course. He never sought an opportunity for meeting or seeing Constance, and he never avoided her; altogether, his ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... boy!" Ookhtishchev interrupted Foma, gently taking his arm. "That isn't right! You have just started to live and already you are philosophizing! No, that is not right! Life is given us to live! Which means—live and let others live. That's the philosophy! And that woman. Bah! Is she then the only one in the world? The world is large enough. If you wish, I'll introduce ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... have thought me hard,' he burst out at length, as they were nearing the drawing-room windows and the garden-door. 'I never can manage to express what I feel, somehow I always fall to philosophizing, but I am sorry for you. Yes, I am; it's beyond my power to help you, as far as altering facts goes, but I can feel for you, in a way which it's best not to talk about, for it can do no good. Remember how sorry I am for you! I shall often be thinking ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... I have described the origin and decline of Greek Mythology; in this, I am to relate the first European attempt at philosophizing. The Ionian systems spring directly out of the contemporary religious opinions, and appear as a phase in Greek ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... justified in requiring that all who know you should worship but one goddess, as the Jews do but one god. But I entreat you do not again compare yourself to the brainless Cyprian dame. You may be allowed to do so, so far as your grace is concerned; but who ever saw an Aphrodite philosophizing and reading serious books? I have disturbed you in grave studies no doubt; what is the book you are ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... soup stand untasted. "Why—why," he faltered, "didn't she enjoy herself?" And a historian of Venice, whose mind should have been wholly engaged in philosophizing the republic's difficult past, hung abjectly upon the question whether a young girl had or had not had a ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... in an age when scientific research was almost unknown, about a subject in which he was an amateur. I confess I do not see how he, or John Stuart Mill, or any one else, writing in that age, could have formulated the true rules of philosophizing; because the materials and information were scarcely to hand. Science and its methods were only beginning to grow. No doubt it was a brilliant attempt. No doubt also there are many good and true points ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... prettiness and favor and noble tragedy of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet into a bawd's tale; a tale of brutal, vile lust; for such passion as he depicts is not love. He took Hamlet and transformed him from a melancholy, a philosophizing Dane into a yelling man, a man of the steppes, soaked with vodka and red-handed with butchery. Hamlet, forsooth! Those twelve strokes of the bell are the veriest melodrama. And Francesca da Rimini—who has not read of the gentle, lovelorn pair in Dante's priceless poem; and how they ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... them.(4) They are letters of guidance, spiritual letters. The laic confessor endeavours, before all things, to calm the impatience of this soul which is more and more ardent and more and more troubled every day. He battles with her about her mania of philosophizing, her wish to sift everything and to get to the bottom of everything. Strong in his own calmness, he kept repeating to her in a hundred different ways the words: "Be calm!" The advice was good; the only difficulty was ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... himself of the title of this play in his own mind, and worked upon it as a dream throughout, but especially, and, perhaps, unpleasingly, in this broad determination of ungrateful treachery in Helena, so undisguisedly avowed to herself, and this, too, after the witty cool philosophizing that precedes. The act itself is natural, and the resolve so to act is, I fear, likewise too true a picture of the lax hold which principles have on a woman's heart, when opposed to, or even separated from, passion and inclination. ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... of the universe; a vain attempt, since it is impossible for man with his limited intelligence to discover the principles which govern the acts of the gods. In imitation of them, the Chinese nation has since given itself up to philosophizing, to which are to be attributed its constant internal dissensions. When things go right of themselves, it is best to leave them alone. In ancient times, although there was no prosy system in Japan, there, were no popular disturbances, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... From this retrospective philosophizing with the lesson that it taught, John turned to dreaming of Consuello as the one he loved. His imagination, from which he slipped the leash of worry and care, pictured for him gloriously delightful, utterly impossible scenes—Consuello and he on a yacht skimming the rolling waves ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... than ever as she looked. She found herself wondering how much free choice the grouse—if they were capable themselves of philosophizing—would imagine themselves to possess in the face of this noisy but insidious death. She reminded herself that every shred of instinct and experience that each furious little head contained bade the owner of it to fly as fast and straight as possible, in squawking ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... as this, a young teacher philosophizing upon his success and the causes of it, will almost invariably make this mistake; viz., he will attribute to something essentially excellent in his plans, the success which, in fact results ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... necessity for work saved me from undue philosophizing; and night found me ten miles on my seaward voyage, with the three dogs skinned and their fur wrapped around me as a coat. I also frayed a small piece of rope into oakum and mixed it with the fat from the intestines of my dogs. But, alas, I found ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... or you've got to cough up double what you counted on when it's the other way about; so it works out the same always; you get soaked whether you buy or sell, from the cradle to the grave you're always catching shiners!" While Mr. Shrimplin was still philosophizing big drops of warm spring rain began to splash and patter on the long reach of still water before them. He scrambled to his feet. "We are going to have some weather, Custer!" he said, and they had scarcely time in which to drive Bill under the shelter of a disused hay barracks in an ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... American reader the allusion to "the blood sacrifice," which is necessary in politics as in religion, would border on impiety; with the French it is probably a proof of religious faith. Lamartine, in his views and conceptions, in his mode of thinking and philosophizing, is much more nearly allied to the German than to the English schools; only that, instead of a philosophical system, carried through with a rigorous and unsparing logic, he indulges in philosophical reveries. As a statesman Lamartine lacks ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... regarded life as the only limit of study, is shown by Valerius, in his book addressed to Tiberius, by many examples. Carneades, he says, was a laborious and lifelong soldier of wisdom: after he had lived ninety years, the same day put an end to his life and his philosophizing. Isocrates in his ninety-fourth year wrote a most noble work. Sophocles did the same when nearly a hundred years old. Simonides wrote poems in his eightieth year. Aulus Gellius did not desire to live longer than he should ...
— The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury • Richard de Bury
... dislike them because they are destructive to Religion; and if a Minister of the Gospel was to dissuade and deter Men from Duelling he would do it in quite another Manner. By a Minister of the Gospel I don't mean a Philosophizing Divine, or a polite Preacher, but a sincere Follower of the Apostles, a down-right Christian. He would, in the First Place, insist upon it, that Forgiving of Injuries was a Christian Duty never to be dispens'd with; because it is made ...
— An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War • Bernard Mandeville |
