"Doubter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... answered, in writing, the deaf man. "A little suspicion soon overspreads the whole nature, and yet, I think, one can be generous even with suspicion. Among the disciples were a traitor, a liar, a coward, and a doubter; but none upbraid the last, poor Thomas, and he is sainted in our faith. Do you know that suspicion made me deaf? Yes; if we mock Nature with distrust, she stops our ears. Do you not remember what happened to Zacharias, ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... for the young man, and the Superior, who observed the storm which was surging within the doubter's breast, did not hesitate to attribute it ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... Letters paint the struggles of an ardent, enthusiastic, inquisitive spirit to deliver itself from the harassing uncertainties, to penetrate the dread obscurity, which overhangs the lot of man. The first faint scruples of the Doubter are settled by the maxim: 'Believe nothing but thy own reason; there is nothing holier than truth.' But Reason, employed in such an inquiry, can do but half the work: she is like the Conjuror that has ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... them. It may be laid down as an axiomatic truth that there has never been and there is not a perfect church. Of the twelve men who formed the nucleus of the Christian church and who had the advantage of the personal teaching of the Christ, one was a doubter, another was worldly-minded, a betrayer, and a son of perdition who sought relief from the stings of conscience by self-destruction; a third was a deserter and vacillator, who drew from the great apostle of the Gentiles a stinging rebuke for stultifying his conscience during that ...
— The Defects of the Negro Church - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 10 • Orishatukeh Faduma
... whatsoe'er he may in silence desire! Comfort impart to the mourner, and give to the doubter instruction, ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... some creed, however mistaken, earnestly held of old. A firm interior conviction is the starting-point of all outward worship. But if the modern living worshipper is without creed and conviction; if he be a scoffer at heart, or at least a doubter; what a hollow, horrid skeleton thing is his religion,—all the more horrid, the grander its dress! That ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... loves His people too well to let their stupid unbelief and hardness of heart interfere with His own gracious purposes! How tenderly He rebukes the spirit of this doubter. "Why," as if He said, "Why distrust me? Why stultify thyself with these unbelieving surmises. Hast thou already forgotten my own gracious assurances, and thine own unqualified acceptance of them. My ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... noble 'doubter,' but speak the words of truth and soberness. Mr. Willcoxen was married privately, when and where I said, to a beautiful, fair-haired lady, whose name heard in the ritual was Marian. And my husband, Olly Murray, was the secret witness of that ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... to be, then, a fatalist, and so vented this command as if he believed "What must be, must be!" unlike the doubter who said: "No! what must be, won't be!" The Douglasites could not meet this change of base, and Trumbull became senator by the Lincolnites' coalition. Lincoln publicly disavowed any ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... was the rule, and not, as now, the decided exception. But with many it is now becoming once every other Sunday, or scarcely that; with so little of 'personal consecration' in the matter that the need for an umbrella may decide the doubter ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 3: New-England Sunday - Gleanings Chiefly From Old Newspapers Of Boston And Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... be accepted, tried, and defeated by a counter rebellion, both peaceable. It is simply leaving things to the will of the majority. Right ideas will win, no matter what the opposition to them. Better change the arena of conflict. A single champion of an idea would once challenge a doubter and prove his hypothesis by the blood of the disputant; you do the same thing on a great scale. The Southern people—very good people as you and I have cause to know—think the constitution gives ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... imperturbable in mind, athletic in body, unconquerable, and immortal. Such individuals meet in comradeship, and pass together along the open roads of the world. No one is excluded because of his poverty or his sins; there is room in the ideal America for everybody except the doubter and sceptic. Whitman does not linger over the smaller groups of human society, like the family. He is not a fireside poet. He passes directly from his strong persons, meeting freely on the open road, to his conception of "these States." One of his typical ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... my work properly. This he had made at his forge, and I suppose it had taken him twice as long to make the special tool as it had to mend the parts of my rake; but when I would have paid him for it he would take nothing save for the mending itself. Nor was this a mere rebuke to a doubter. It had delighted him to do a difficult thing, to show the really great skill he had. Indeed, I think our friendship began right there and was based upon the favour I did in bringing him a job that ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... of the latter-mentioned little book holds it to be probable that Shakspere wrote his Hamlet for the object of freeing himself from the impressions of the famous French sceptic. He regards this masterwork as 'the Drama of the Doubter;' as 'the apotheosis of a practical Christianity.' Hamlet, he says, is wanting in Christian piety. He has no faith, no love, no hope. His last words, 'The rest is silence,' show that he has no expectation ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... for what they rob you of? They can perhaps rob you of your faith in Jesus Christ as a Saviour. But what then, they cannot make you forget that you are a sinner. You know better, your own heart tells you the truth. They can take away the Saviour, and only leave you your sins. The doubter may scoff you out of believing in the resurrection. But can he laugh you out of believing in death? When your little child dies, and you look at the loving eyes closing for the last time, what comfort has your doubting friend to give you? Not a word. He leaves you alone with ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... would say immortal, were I not afraid that most people have forgotten—by bringing his frigate home from Labrador to England after losing her rudder. It is said that he subsequently ran for Parliament, and when on the hustings some doubter asked about his political record, he answered, "I am Captain Rous who brought the Pique across the Atlantic without a rudder." Of course the reply was lustily cheered, and deservedly; for in such seas, with a ship dependent ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... craft of the "unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea." Few can read, or, better, hear read, his closing paragraph without thrilling to that "other harmony of prose." That such a cadenced and haunting passage should have been published as recently as 1917 should assure the doubter that there is still amongst us a taste for the beautiful. "I live inland now, far from the smell of salt water and the sight of sails. Yet sometimes there comes over me a longing for the sea as irresistible as the lust for salt which stampedes the reindeer of the north. I must gaze on the unbroken ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... guilty!" with an eye that flashed and a voice which rang, and a look in his pale, proud face that no murderer's face ever wore on this earth, and with those two words he had carried conviction to many a doubter. ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... but make their escape, and forsake their army, and leave them to fall by the hand of Emmanuel, and of his noble Captain Credence: so they fell all down slain before them, before the Prince, and before his royal army; there was not left so much as one doubter alive; they lay spread upon the ground dead men, as one would ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan
... begin punctually under the present system," he remarked. "Yes," some one replied, "but we always finish so badly." "Oh, I always finish well enough," was the pert rejoinder; "I generally come out on top." "Ah," retorted the other, "I was thinking of the electors." But the doubter did not come out on top at a subsequent election, and his defeat was probably the means of his discovering defects in the old system that no number of successes would have led him into acknowledging. From the two or three members ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... The doubter may scoff, and the pessimist may croak, but even they must take hope at the picture presented in the simple and touching incident of eight Grand Army veterans, with their silvery heads bowed in sympathy, escorting the lifeless body of the Daughter ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... "The doubter burst into an explosion of derisive laughter and walked away. A few paces, and he came back; walking up to Colonel Conwell he seized the axe and said, 'See here, Preacher, this is not the kind of work for a parson or a lawyer. If you are determined to tear this old building ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... literary fragments he has left, and that is found to be the character of a pusillanimous and ill-bred usurer, wholly lacking in foresight, in generous enterprise, and chivalrous enthusiasm—in matters of the Faith a prig or a doubter, in matters of adventure a poltroon, in matters of Science an ignorant Parrot, and in Letters a wretchedly bad rhymester, with a vice for alliteration; a wilful liar (as, for instance, 'The longest way round is the shortest way home'), a startling miser ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... development which become prominent at this period. And firstly we notice the rise of rationalism, that is of the impulse to criticise belief and to ask for that element in it which approves itself to the reflecting mind. Reason asserts its right to judge of tradition; the doubter suggests emendations in the legend; the piously inclined turn their attention to those parts only which are capable of lofty treatment. This tendency is fatal to polytheism. As reason knows not gods but only God, the gods can only hold their place on condition that they are what God must be, and ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... procur'd Xenophon's Memorable Things of Socrates, wherein there are many instances of the same method. I was charm'd with it, adopted it, dropt my abrupt contradiction and positive argumentation, and put on the humble inquirer and doubter. And being then, from reading Shaftesbury and Collins, become a real doubter in many points of our religious doctrine, I found this method safest for myself and very embarrassing to those against whom I used it; therefore I took a delight in it, practis'd ...
— The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... many places he appends notes stating his opposition to them. But he heartily approved the substance of the work, though his object in the publication of the Fragments was more to feel the public pulse than to instill theological doctrines into the minds of the people. Reimarus had been a doubter like many others of his countrymen. He committed his mental phases to paper, though he thought that it was not yet time to issue them for public notice. The Fragments published by Lessing contain the gist of his entire work, and contributed far more to the growth of skepticism ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... advertisements of the hair-restorers—you will forgive the unpoetic simile for the sake of its exactitude—as against the verdict of the world that a genuine discovery of such a remedy would leave no single doubter in Europe or America, nor even in the London Clubs! Yet each time I read the cunning article (I have less hair than when I ran away from Sandhurst that exciting July night and met you in the Strand!), and look upon the picture ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... weakness. Then Jesus yoked them together so that each two made one good man. The hasty, impetuous, self-confident Peter needed the counterbalancing of the cautious, conservative Andrew. Thomas the doubter was matched by Matthew the strong believer. It was not an accidental grouping by which the Twelve fell into six parts. Jesus knew what was in man; and he yoked these men together in a way which brought out the best that was in each of them, and by thus blending their lives, turned their very ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... kiss it and make it well. Please run to her quick.' 'Perfect love casteth out all fear.' Surely the wise mother can devise a thousand ways by which to kindle the flame of love in her child until her fond dreams for the little ones are transformed into living realities. But the doubter may remark, 'What if I ask my child to do something for me and he refuses or begins to make excuses or asks why his brother can't do it?' You have simply mistaken the time for stretching the young soul's wings. Begin the training when the child is in the loving mood and you will rarely fail to ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... vessel to Salamis had scarce escaped the Egyptian triremes, and how by this time all entrance and exit was surely closed. But even now many an angry captain called him "liar." The strife of words was at white heat when Eurybiades himself silenced the fiercest doubter. ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... Grey, and Agnostic like Arnold, than I did in the Broad Church teachers, but these, of course, served to make return to the old faith more and more impossible. The Church services were a weekly torture, but feeling as I did that I was only a doubter, I kept my doubts to myself. It was possible, I felt, that all my difficulties might be cleared up, and I had no right to shake the faith of others while in uncertainty myself. Others had doubted and had afterwards recovered their faith; for the doubter silence was ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... permit it to desert,' Mr. Clark stood forward on every occasion the uncompromising champion of spiritual independence, and of the rights of the Christian people. He took his place far in the van. He was no mere half-and-half non-intrusionist,—no complaisant eulogist of the Veto,—no timid doubter that the Church in behalf of her people might possibly stretch her powers too far, and thus separate her temporalities from her cures. Nothing could be more absurd, he asserted, than to imagine such a thing. On parade day, when she ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... person so familiar with all outdoors as my father. Then came a second discovery: it could curl its beak in a little coil when leaving a flower. A few days later I saw distinctly that it had four wings but I could discover no feet. I became a rank doubter, and when these convincing proofs were carried to my father, he ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... The doubter, the investigator, the infidel, have been the saviors of liberty. The truth is beginning to be realized, and the truly intellectual are honoring the brave thinker of the past. But the church is as unforgiving as ever, and still wonders why any infidel should be wicked ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... same notes that no man need take and few would, since they are irredeemable on demand." As to the constitutionality of the bill, he thought that whoever "admits our power to emit bills of credit, nowhere expressly authorized by the Constitution, is an unreasonable doubter when he denies the power to make them a legal-tender." "The proposition of the gentleman from New York" (Mr. Roscoe Conkling), continued Mr. Stevens, "authorizes the issuing of seven per cent. bonds, payable in thirty-one years, to be sold ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... inclines them to intolerance. The more keen they are, the more contemptuous they become. What Wordsworth admirably called "the self-applauding sincerity of a heated mind" leaves them no loophole for doubt, and no understanding of the doubter. In their volcanic progress they bowl over the non-partisan—a man and a brother—with splendid unconcern. He, poor soul, stunned but not convinced, clings desperately to some pettifogging convictions which he calls truth, and refuses a clearer vision. His habit of remembering ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... ill who leave me out; When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt, And I the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... not generally lack of principle, Miss Rose,' said her brother-in-law, 'that turns a man a doubter in politics, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... began abruptly: "The doubter may be convinced if he will but put himself in the way of it. The life of my granddaughter is more valuable to-day than that of any king or queen. Her mission is to open the door between the two worlds. She is here ready for the test. Let the men of science come to ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... as heaven and hell are opposites. Considering doubters more closely, we find that doubters believe; but they believe the opposite of what they should believe. Doubters believe the wrong thing. A doubter is one who could and ought to believe facts, but for some reason or other can not bring himself to do it. Instead, he believes another set of things, which appear to ...
— Adventures in the Land of Canaan • Robert Lee Berry
... of mind which can be relieved only by investigating the matter. This compulsion once acceded to, it becomes more and more easy to succumb. The next step is to blur, by constant repetition, the mental image of the act. In extreme cases the doubter, after turning the gas on and off a dozen times, is finally in doubt whether he can trust his own senses. A certain officer in a bank never succeeded in reaching home after closing hours without returning to try the door of the bank. Upon finding it locked, he would unlock ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... acquisitive, subtle, and sensitive, able to look all around their labyrinth and see far into darkness, but not out to the light. It is by nature rather a German than an Anglo-Saxon habit. It is not always fatal even there. De Wette, 'the veteran doubter,' rallied at the last, and, like Bunyan's Feeble-mind, went over almost shouting. In this country, youth often have it somewhat later than the measles and the small-pox, and come through very well, without even a pock-mark. Sometimes it becomes epidemic, ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... whoever hid this ivory, if there's any there, get it up to the cave, if it is a cave?" asked Don the Doubter. ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Yukon • Ralph Victor
... stringing us, I expect, boys!" exploded the doubter; "it sounds just like a fairy story to me. But then there was some one here, because we glimpsed him disappearing like a falling star. I wanted to give him a shot, but I remembered what Max here said about shooting when in doubt; and we ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie
... himself to fall under your sway debars himself utterly from every chance of success. Fiddlesticks! I snap my fingers at such folly. What do these gentlemen say to the case of FIGTREE, the great Q.C.? Everybody knows that FIGTREE is, without exception, the most indolent man in the world. Let any doubter walk down Middle Temple Lane and ask the first young barrister he meets what he thinks of FIGTREE. I am ready to wager my annual income that the reply will be, "What, Old FIGTREE! Why, he's the laziest man at the Bar. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 12, 1891 • Various
... to believe that a man who could express himself in this way and show this courage was a doubter, a skeptic, an unbeliever, an agnostic, an infidel. "Christ is God." This was Lincoln's faith in 1860, found in a letter addressed to the ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... Hardly had the doubter gathered up his slippers, and backed out from the presence, when the pacha and his minister were, with an honest rivalry, endeavouring to remove at once their doubts and their thirst; and were so successful in their attempts, that they, in a short time, exchanged their state ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... fashion, a young woman in all ways worthy of his honest devotion, who shared the dangers and privations of his lot with a willing spirit and light heart. There is no known record of her name; of her charms of mind and person tradition is silent and the doubter is at liberty to entertain his doubt; but God forbid that I should share it! Of their affection and happiness there is abundant assurance in every added day of the man's widowed life; for what but the magnetism of a blessed ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... did not the city government make a piece of work of putting an end to such a scandal?" inquired a doubter in spectral visitations. ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous
... coming slowly towards him. Could it be he whom Dode loved,—this Palmer? A doubter? an infidel? He had told her this to-day. A mere flesh-and-brain machine, made for the world, and no uses in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... his mind enabled him quickly to supply the place of everything he would remove and destroy; and, far from being the victim of those frigid and indifferent feelings which must ever be the portion of the mere doubter, Herbert, on the contrary, looked forward with ardent and sanguine enthusiasm to a glorious and ameliorating future, which should amply compensate and console a misguided and unhappy race for the miserable past and the painful and dreary present. ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... no marked achievement in coherence, but neither was Browett a coherent personality. It was, however, a swift, vivid sermon—a short and a busy one, with a reason for each of its parts, incoherent though the parts were. For Browett was a cynic doubter of his own faith; at once an admirer of Voltaire and a believer in the Established Order of Things; despising a radical and a conservative equally, but, hating more than either, a clumsy compromiser. He ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... unrectified gossip, as shown by Mr Bolton Corney in his razorly reply to Mr Isaac D'israeli. But Thomas Hariot, on the contrary, possessed abundantly what they all lacked, the necessary credentials. For proof of this assertion the doubter, as well as the lover of confirmed historical accuracy, is referred to the Hariot papers still preserved partly at Petworth and partly in ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... God and his mother now! Unwise counsellors will persuade the half crazy doubter in his own faith, to believe that he does believe!—how much better to convince him that his faith is a poor thing, that he must rise and go and do the thing that Jesus tells him, and so believe indeed! When will men understand that it is neither ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... had served as members of the national convention that framed the document or of the state ratifying conventions. Only one man of influence in the new government, Thomas Jefferson, the Secretary of State, was reckoned as a doubter in the house of the faithful. He had expressed opinions both for and against the Constitution; but he had been out of the country acting as the minister at Paris when the ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... minority when the Church tortured, racked, and burned them for the glory of God and the good of humanity. He is of the minority, as was Roger Williams when, in 1635, the popular and conventional thought of Salem banished him. Mr. King is not an infidel or even a doubter. On the contrary he is ardently religious, being a zealous and conscientious member of a sect of Christians noted for their piety and faith. The Adventists, of whom he is an honored member, it must be remembered, hold somewhat peculiar views about the second ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... could doubt the existence of the external world, and treat it as a phantasm; he could doubt the existence of a God, and treat the belief as a superstition; but of the existing of his thinking, doubting mind no sort of doubt was possible. He, the doubter, existed if nothing else existed. The existence that was revealed in his own consciousness was the primary fact, the first indubitable certainty. Hence his famous "Cogito, ergo sum" ("I ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... first possibility he felt himself unable to cope without the aid of Mr. Harper; the second might be met with candor. Should he then be candid with this doubter, relate to him the facts as they had unrolled themselves before his own eyes;—secret facts—convincing ones—facts which must prove to him that whether Georgian did or did not lie at the bottom of the ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... The honest doubter will be welcomed to glory while the canting hypocrite is hustled into the patrol ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... scourged the meek Redeemer, who had crowned his guileless head with thorns, who had pierced and slain him. The rack, the gibbet, and the stake were not enough to glut the pious hate this priestly trickery inspired. It was not enough that the doubter's life should go out in the blaze of the crackling fagots, but it must be loaded in eternity with ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... person to get news. The victory was proclaimed in the market-place, at the theatre, the gymnasium, and the camp. Every one who wears garlands or weapons heard of a battle won. Yesterday, among all the thousands, there was scarcely a single doubter; but to-day-how does it happen? Even among those who as 'Inimitables' have shared all the pleasures, entertainments, and festivities of our noble pair, faith wavers; for if they were firmly convinced of the brilliant victory which was announced loudly ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the authors of the ancient solar fables, ever doubting whether God Sol, after inaugurating Winter by his supposed retreat from the earth, would return to revivify nature with his life-giving rays, gave to the genius of the twelfth month the title of the Doubter. In the Christian calendar this personification is known as Thomas, and a more specific dedication of the shortest day of the year having been made to him, the 21st day of December is called ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... a mighty intellectual and moral force does plough the channel of its thought and character through many generations. It would be well for any doubter to study the records of thoroughbreds in the animal world. The highest record ever made for milk and butter was by an animal of no family, and she was valuable only for what she could earn. None of her power went to her offspring. ...
— Jukes-Edwards - A Study in Education and Heredity • A. E. Winship
... to be sure, explanation is not enough. The brain paths between the associated ideas are so deeply worn that no amount of persuasion avails. It is easy for the doubter to say: "Well, that sounds very well, but my case is different. I have tried over and over again and I know." With people of this sort, an ounce of demonstration is ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty; containing, among Many Surprising and Curious Matters, the Unutterable Ponderings of Walter the Doubter, the Disastrous Projects of William the Testy, and the Chivalric Achievements of Peter the Headstrong,—the Three Dutch Governors of New Amsterdam: being the Only Authentic History of the Times ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... vanished. The sandal, however, was found beneath the chest, and was eventually burnt.—Do you still doubt, Tychiades, in the face of one convincing piece of evidence after another?' 'God forbid!' I cried; 'the doubter who should presume, thus to brazen it out in the face of Truth would deserve to have a golden sandal applied to him ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... came almost daily. Pelle had become a part of his life, and he watched his young friend's condition with anxiety. Was it the prison life—or was it perhaps the books—that had transformed this young man, who had once gone ahead with tempestuous recklessness, into a hesitating doubter who could not come to a decision? Personality was of doubtful value when it grew at the expense of energy. It had been the old man's hope that it would have developed greater energy through being replanted in fresh, untouched soil, and he tried to ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... of Cicero's Consulship; that he left the city suddenly; that he was killed in the neighborhood of Pistoia fighting against the Generals of the Republic, and that he left certain accomplices in Rome who were put to death by an edict of the Senate. So much I think is certain to the most truculent doubter. From his contemporaries, Sallust and Cicero, we have a very strongly expressed opinion of his character. They have left to us denunciations of the man which have made him odious to all after-ages, so that modern poets have made him a stock character, ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... the Doubter is not yet extinct, and many, as usual, shook their wise heads at the enterprise. It was admitted that in inland navigation the Americans had beaten the world; that except an occasional blow-up, their river steamers were ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... circumstance, was assuredly and exactly the one only man to be troubled by any momentary fear that such might indeed be the solution of his riddle, and to feel or to fancy for the moment some kind of ease and relief in the sense of that very trouble. A born doubter would have doubted even of Horatio; hardly can all positive and almost palpable evidence of underhand instigation and inspired good intentions induce Hamlet for some time to doubt even ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... that faith in dogmatic Christianity. His own doubts apparently were of a different kind. Nowhere in his pages have we found a humble, candid, sympathetic attempt to meet the difficulties that may be felt by an ingenuous mind. Everywhere he supposes that the doubter is hardened, conceited, consciously shutting his eyes to the light—a fool who is to be answered according to his folly—that is, with ready replies made up of reckless assertions, of apocryphal anecdotes, and, where other resources fail, of vituperative imputation. As to ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... forcibly. But to this young boy's piercing mind, the arguments against Christianity seemed stronger than those which were brought forward to refute them. Thus the lad became, not a positive unbeliever, but an honest doubter. He now sought earnestly for other works upon that ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... been baptised as "Pride's Cure" soon after Hallowe'en, for at Christmas it was submitted under that title to Kemble, and about the same time (December 28, 1799) we find Lamb defending the title (with the vehemence and subtlety of a doubter, as I read) against the adverse criticism of Manning and Mrs. Charles Lloyd. Lamb had lately been on a visit to these friends at Cambridge, and had doubtless taken a copy of his play with him and received their objections there ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... to Science for the growth of faith. That bold denier of accepted creeds - That mighty doubter of accepted truths - Shall yet reveal God's secrets to the world, And prove the facts it seeks to overthrow. And a new name shall Science henceforth bear - The Great Religion ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the sod, And bids him cast away the reed Of some uncomforting poor creed, And walk with Knowledge for a rod. It bids the doubter seek the broad Vast fields, where living facts will feed All those whose patience proves their need Of these ...
— New Thought Pastels • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... man her country, friends, and home. Never woman endeavored with truer single-heartedness to understand her spouse. In her life's aim was no failure. Let him expatiate on sound to the bounds of fancy's extravagance, she could confidently follow, and would have volunteered her testimony to a doubter, as if all were a question of tangible fact, to be definitely proved. So in every matter. For all the comfort she was to the man she loved, for her confidence in him who deserved it, for her patient endurance of whatsoever ill she met or bore, for choosing to walk in so peaceful a manner, with a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... forth to defend her, And her peerless worth proclaim; Challenging each recreant doubter Who aspersed ...
— Legends and Lyrics: First Series • Adelaide Anne Procter
... and the siege of Mantua. With a German's fondness for music, he beguiled the tedium of many a long winter evening. With his German education he had imbibed radicalism to its full extent. Thoroughly conversant with the Sacred Scriptures he was a doubter, if not a positive unbeliever, from the Pentateuch to Revelation. In addition to this, his flings at the Chaplain, his messmate, made him unpopular with the religiously inclined of the regiment. He had besides, ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... adjusted his glasses and turned them upon the doubter for the space of three minutes, but Holman was blissfully ignorant of the look which the angry archaeologist favoured him with. The youngster was watching the firelight upon the face of Miss Barbara Herndon, and his thoughts were probably ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... a just God. In my worst trials I have never doubted that," replied Lord Cairnforth, solemnly. And then he repeated those words of St. Paul, to which many an agonized doubter has clung, as being the last refuge of sorrow—the only key to mysteries which sometime shake the firmest faith—"'For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... their deliverers; again and again the cheers rang in tones that were full of gratitude. As they passed on, an armed Mormon stepped to the side of each man and walked with him, thus convincing the last doubter of their sincerity in wishing to guard them from any unexpected attack by ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... to the Jews alone. Every great world-faith experiences nowadays the throes of transformation and readjustment. Mistaking them for the final struggle, the believer wrings his hands in despair over the impending doom, and the doubter contemplates a religionless future with a great deal of glee. But both will be disappointed in their reckoning. Religion, as we shall see, is entirely too inherent in human life to be dispensable. The belief that it has served its purpose in the ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... OF DOUBT. Doubt not mere unbelief. True grounds for doubt. What doubt has led to. Examples. The weakness of mere doubt. The attitude of the wholesome doubter versus ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... to come with his doubts, and Christ will set him free. "My doubts are round about me like a chain," said one in the audience, with whom one of our personal workers was labouring, and the worker said quickly, "Come, chains and all." The doubter hesitated a second, then said, "I will," and as he rose to move forward, he testified that the chains were snapped, and he ...
— The Personal Touch • J. Wilbur Chapman
... innocent and beautiful beliefs of which a growing scepticism has robbed us in the decay of supernaturalism. But we need not despair; for, after all, scepticism is first cousin of credulity, and we are not surprised to see the tough doubter Montaigne hanging up his offerings in the shrine of our Lady of Loreto. Scepticism commonly takes up the room left by defect of imagination, and is the very quality of mind most likely to seek for sensual proof of supersensual things. ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... somebody will blindly disbelieve. Dugald Stewart could see nothing but "frauds of arch-forgers" in what was added to our knowledge of ancient India when the Sanskrit language and literature were discovered. In the same way, here and there a doubter has hesitated to accept the fact communicated by these Norse records; but, with the evidence before us, we may as reasonably doubt any unquestioned fact of history ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... vindicate the right. Crime shall be meted with its proper pain, Motes shall be taken from the doubter's sight, And fortune's general justice rendered plain. Of honest laughter there shall be no dearth, Wit shall shake hands with humor grave and sweet, Our wisdom shall not be too wise for mirth, Nor kindred follies want a fool to greet. As sometimes from the meanest ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... of medicine," Hippocrates, banished demonology and conceived disease as due to natural causes. At a slightly later day the sophists challenged all knowledge, and Pyrrhonism became a synonym for scepticism in recognition of the leadership of a master doubter. The entire school of Alexandrians must have been relatively free from superstition, else they could not have reasoned with such effective logicality from their observations of nature. It is almost inconceivable that men like Euclid and Archimedes, and Aristarchus and Eratosthenes, and Hipparchus ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... and asked, like a doubter, "When he hangs on those Spaces sublime With the Terror that knoweth no limit, And holdeth no record ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... without fear principles which seem startling, but which are proved to be rooted in democratic ground, so long as we have faith in the democratic system itself. There is no road open for the doubter and questioner of popular rights but that which leads back to abandoned ground. We may proceed, then, with an attempt to explain the philosophy of the rule of Change. Shall ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... quitting the prejudice of your whole precedent life. I will not forestall your judgment by saying anything more of this book, but only wish it may afford as much entertainment as it has me. This historic doubter dined with me yesterday, Williams, Lord March, Cadogan, and Fanshaw, qui m'a demande a diner, at ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... is needed of aesthetic defect in the still unoccidentalized Japanese taste let the doubter go to any popular second-grade Shinto shrine or Buddhist temple. Here unaesthetic objects and sights abound. Hideous idols, painted and unpainted, big and little, often decorated with soiled bibs; decaying to-rii; ruined sub-shrines; conglomerate piles of cast-off paraphernalia, consisting ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... doubts, would, in the next hour, the next week, or the next month, come in the midst of doubts to be of Privy Seal's mind. Then Privy Seal hath pushed him to action. Now his Highness is a good lover, and being himself a great doubter, he loveth a simple and convinced nature. Therefore he hath ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... whether believing or sceptical, would have found no place for their science, for the miracles of Christ were of such a kind that the most scientific doubter could have no more accounted for them than the most ignorant. The miracle of which, next to our Lord's own Resurrection, we have the fullest evidence, is that of the feeding of the 5,000; for it is recorded by each ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler
... in anything," said a poor doubter, who had trusted in human prudence, and been disappointed; who had endeavored to walk by the lumine of self-derived intelligence, instead of by the light of divine truth, and so lost his way in the world. He was fifty years old! What a sad confession ...
— All's for the Best • T. S. Arthur
... on the remnant and the waste, Can you absolve me,—me, the doubter, one Who challenged what God spent His genius on, His genius and His pride; ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Lord to Mary, give the dawning of faith before sight and the rapturous faith born of sight. In the remainder of the chapter are two more instances of faith following vision, and the teaching of the whole is summed up in Christ's words to the doubter, 'Because thou hast seen Me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... tried to voice the plea of the young doubter, puzzled, perplexed and suffering from the great array of apparently conflicting facts and most of all from his own failure to win out over the temptations that ...
— The Girl and Her Religion • Margaret Slattery
... instance, the fame of which spread through the whole Colony and confounded any possible doubter, found record in the "Magnalia", that storehouse of fact so judiciously combined with fable that the author himself could probably never tell what he had himself seen, and what had been gleaned from others. Mr. ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... the Princess dwelt a deep religious faith, such as becomes a noble, womanly heart. Nevertheless, her ardent mind sought to penetrate every mystery, so she was often accused of being a doubter—when the reverse was ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... retraction &c. 607. doubt &c. (uncertainty) 475; skepticism, scepticism, misgiving, demure; distrust, mistrust, cynicism; misdoubt[obs3], suspicion, jealousy, scruple, qualm; onus probandi[Lat]. incredibility, incredibleness; incredulity. [person who doubts] doubter, skeptic, cynic.; unbeliever &c. 487. V. disbelieve, discredit; not believe &c. 484; misbelieve[obs3]; refuse to admit &c. (dissent) 489; refuse to believe &c. (incredulity) 487. doubt; be doubtful &c. (uncertain) 475; doubt the truth of; be skeptical as to &c. adj.; diffide|; distrust, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... man who affects to doubt everything he hears, I never hesitate about writing him down an ass. A great doubter is a solemn and self-conceited prig. How amusing is it to see the blockhead shake his empty pate, compress his lips into a sneer, and turn up his absurd unmeaning eyes in dubious disbelief, when he hears aught which he thinks it would imply sagacity to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 583 - Volume 20, Number 583, Saturday, December 29, 1832 • Various
... ancient and half-ruined pile of stone and make-believe rocks," Arthur told the doubter, "couldn't find a purchaser in a coon's age. Who would ever want to come away up here to bury themselves from civilization, and in such a silly old rookery as this? Well, it was one chance in a thousand that a nervous wreck like your aunt ...
— The Boy Scouts with the Motion Picture Players • Robert Shaler
... Uncle Terry's mildly flavored shafts of sarcasm, he made no enemies and his kind heart and sterling honesty were respected far and near. He was considered a doubter and skeptic, and though seldom seen at church, as he had originally contributed his share when that edifice was built, his lack of piety ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... to say to the other, "Touch your eyes, if what you say is true." If he touched his eyes, the dispute was settled. It was as if he had said, "May I be cursed with blindness if it is not true what I say." Or the doubter would say to his opponent, "Who will eat you? Say the name of your god." He whose word was doubted would then name the household god of his family, as much as to say, "May god So-and-so destroy me, if what I have said is not true." Or the person whose word ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... ill who leave me out; When me they fly I am the wings: I am the doubter and the doubt, And I the hymn ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... who digs the soil for the planting of corn which shall help to feed his fellows. And the most despicable creature of our time and century, is not the man who doubts Christ, or questions God—for Christ was patient with the doubter, and God answers, through the medium of science, every honest question—it is the man who pretends to believe and lives on the pretence, while his conduct gives the lie to his profession! That is why you—and why thousands of others like you, are beginning to look upon many of the ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... in itself a beauty and a joy for ever. For the good fighter there is always fine recompense; a clear mind, warm blood, quick imagination, grasp of life and joy in action, and at the end of day always an eminence won. Yes, and from the height of that eminence will come ringing down to the last doubter a last word: we may reach the mountaintops in aspiring ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... obvious enough. But by and by out of the very doubt came the sweetness[150] of a higher and truer insight. He became aware that there were "things in heaven and earth undreamt of in your philosophy," as another doubter said, who had just finished his studies, but could not find his way out of the scepticism ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... that kind of vernal gladness. What an advent! When you find the first blue egg in the shrubbery behind your billet in Artois; when the G. S. O. 2 comes into the mess with a violet in his fingers, and shows it to every doubter, then you know the time has come for the testing of the gas cylinders, and you wonder whether this is the last time you will be noteworthy because you had the earliest news of the chiffchaff. The spring offensive! Guns are now converging by leagues ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... comparatively commonplace novels. The re-writing of the first volume was completed in September 1835; the whole book in January 1837. The mood in which it was written throws a light on the excellences as on the defects of the history. The Reminiscences again record the gloom and defiance of "Thomas the Doubter" walking through the London streets "with a feeling similar to Satan's stepping the burning marl," and scowling at the equipages about Hyde Park Corner, sternly thinking, "Yes, and perhaps none ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... doctrine which is the greatest challenge to the doubter: "Conceived by the Holy Ghost; born of the Virgin Mary,"—a doctrine fiercely fought by Harnack and yet by no means to be dismissed as he dismisses it. His teaching on this point seems to me the result of his theory of Christianity. If one seeks to rid Christianity ...
— The Things Which Remain - An Address To Young Ministers • Daniel A. Goodsell
... defending the town. It's merely——I'm a confirmed doubter of myself. (Probably I'm conceited about my lack of conceit!) Anyway, Gopher Prairie isn't particularly bad. It's like all villages in all countries. Most places that have lost the smell of earth but not yet acquired the smell of patchouli—or of factory-smoke—are ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... sincerely inquiring doubter, the striking way in which the truth of the Resurrection is exhibited must be most beneficial, but such a character we are compelled to believe is rare among those ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... should be fruitless in this respect.... Moral instruction, however, can have no practical effect unless there be some agreement concerning the nature of the final goal—not a mere verbal agreement, to be sure, but one based upon actual feeling.... It will be the business of ethics to invite the doubter and the inquirer to assist in the common effort to discover fixed principles which shall help the judgment to understand the aims and problems ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft
... "Poor, weak doubter!" said Mr. Carroll, in a tender, yet reproving voice. "Does not He who calls us to this labor know our wants? And is not He able to supply them? Have you forgotten that the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof? Whose are the cattle upon a thousand hills? Did ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... to be subjected to a re-examination, and Descartes found himself on bedrock when he touched his famous Cogito, ergo sum. The simple fact or act of Doubt implied the Activity—the Reality therefore—of the Doubter. But the cogitant subject was reduced very much to the condition of a tabula rasa, and when Descartes proceeded to fill up the blank with a rediscovery on more scientific lines of the essentials of Cognition he found ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... Drown each dread annoyance Deep, thy soul within; Whisper ever lowly of her glad, true eyes; Sing her name, love, slowly, thou can'st sympathize; Teach my heart, my wilful heart, the faith of peace, Promising her constancy with time's increase. Bar, Oh! break the sadness Of the doubter's sin; Sing eternal gladness, ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... authority of the Church for it, and of that we must be certain. That certainly must not for a moment falter, and the moment it does falter, there is no telling but that the whole edifice so laboriously raised will tumble down upon the guilty shoulders of the imprudent doubter. ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... would not come and, her father being indifferent upon the point (Lady Jane did not count in such matters), ceased her attendance. It was the old story of a strait-minded bigot forcing a large-minded doubter out of the fold that ought to have been wide enough for both of them. Moreover, this difference of opinion on matters of public and spiritual interest ended in a private and mundane animosity. Mr. Knight could never forgive a pupil of his own, whose ability he recognized, who dared to question his ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... towards him, and then one got up and hit him, and afterwards the other hit him, and then again the first hit him, and so on, until they drove him out of the room, and finally out of the house. In this way he was kicked out by his own boots, and Donegal was avenged upon its doubter. It is not recorded whether the invisible being was a ghost or one of the Sidhe, but the fantastic nature of the vengeance is like the work of the Sidhe who live in the ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... type of doubter everywhere—and especially in India where official rank is but the guinea stamp and gold ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... Wise doubter, look at a small piece of iron. It looks solid. You suppose that its various parts touch. ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... love-letter from Bud, while satisfying the cravings of the lover, stirred up again the misgivings of the doubter. And her cogitations resulted in the admission that Bud must be either one of two things. Either he was absolutely innocent of the imputations contained in the letter that Skidmore brought, or he was one of the most consummate ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... golden age of the province of the New-Netherlands, when it was under the sway of Wouter Van Twiller, otherwise called the Doubter, the people of the Manhattoes were alarmed, one sultry afternoon, just about the time of the summer solstice, by a tremendous storm of thunder and lightning. The rain descended in such torrents, as absolutely to spatter up and smoke along the ground. It seemed as if the thunder rattled and rolled ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... a curious mark in a stone at Jerusalem. According to this, St. Thomas, after the ascension of the Lord, was again troubled with doubts, whereupon the Virgin Mother threw down her girdle, which left its imprint upon the rock, and thus converted the doubter fully ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... the table. When Thomas had untied the string and held the moose-hide sack by its two lower corners bottom upwards there clattered out upon the boards enough of good-sized golden nuggets to cause the eyes of the doubter ...
— The Trail of a Sourdough - Life in Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... servitor, hearing the mumble of the old man's voice, tiptoed to the door and peeped in. He goggled at the tableau and listened to the words. He was in the state of mind of that oft-quoted doubter who spat on the giraffe's hoof and remarked to the bystanders, "Hell! There ain't no ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... appeared "with colours flying, trumpets sounding, and the feet of his men scarce touched the ground; they hasted with such celerity towards the captains that were engaged that . . . there was not left so much as one Doubter alive, they lay spread upon the ground dead men as one would spread dung on the land." The dead were buried "lest the fumes and ill-favours that would arise from them might infect the air and so annoy the famous town of Mansoul." But it will be a fight to the end for Diabolus, and ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... Socratic method; and soon after I procured Xenophon's Memorable Things of Socrates, wherein there are many instances of the same method. I was charmed with it, adopted it, dropt my abrupt contradiction and positive argumentation, and put on the humble inquirer and doubter.... I found this method safest for myself and very embarrassing to those against whom I used it; therefore I took a delight in it, practised it continually, and grew very artful and expert in drawing people, ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... the way ahere? Now see, here is dust, dry dust on her hull. She ahain't ben in the water mor'n ten minutes, I sware," It required but a moment's investigation of my Chincoteague audience to discover that the dust was mud from the tide, and the doubter brought down the ridicule of his more discriminating neighbors upon him, and slunk ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... will doubt and fear me, And think this heart to other loves will stray, If I must swear, then, lovely doubter, hear me; By every dream I have when thou'rt away, By every throb I feel when thou art near me, I love but ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... "But," argues the doubter, "all of this is against human nature. How is it possible to expect that men will stop possessing, or will lose the desire ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing
... because life has for him an infinite meaning, because he opens his mind to the impressions which come of man's spiritual existence. In the same way, Carlyle has a grander meaning running through his books, more of sublimity, a finer eloquence, because the spiritual is to him real. Doubter and scorner as he was, he could not but see that man's being reaches beyond the material world and interprets some higher realm. Vague as that faith was with him, it was a source of the most effective literary power and stimulus. He bursts forth, under its impulse, into impassioned passages ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... thought confidently that this was a secure and permanent progressive system, and on the strength of some three hundred years of change and irregular improvement answered the doubter with, "Things always have gone well. ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... to his father the convenience of saying grace over the whole barrel of salt fish, in bulk, as the mercantile phrase would be. By the time that he was sixteen, Shaftesbury and Collins, efficiently aided by the pious writers who had endeavored to refute them, had made him "a real doubter in many points of our religious doctrine;" and while he was still his brother's apprentice in Boston, he fell into disrepute as a skeptic. Apparently he gathered momentum in moving along this line of thought, ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... (malefice)? From maleficiendo, which means male de fide sentiendo.[72] A curious etymology, but one that will hold a great deal. Once trace a resemblance between witchcraft and evil opinions, and every wizard becomes a heretic, every doubter a wizard. All who think wrongly can be burnt for wizards. This was done at Arras; and they long to establish the same rule, little by ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... as corroboration for so outrageous a facture as the cognomen Daddleskink, but it served to convince the doubter. ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Aramis most narrowly while he uttered these words, which displayed so much true respect, so much warm devotion, such entire frankness and sincerity, that even he, D'Artagnan, the eternal doubter, he, the almost infallible in his judgment, was deceived by it. "A man who lies cannot speak in such a tone as that," ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... matter;' which gained him the reputation of a man slow of belief and not easily imposed upon. What is more, it has gained him a lasting name; for to this habit of the mind has been attributed his surname of Twiller; which is said to be a corruption of the original Twijfler, or, in plain English, Doubter. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... glance that could convict a liar of his lie and make him confess it; that could bring down a proud man's pride and make him humble; that could put courage into a coward and strike dead the courage of the bravest; that could appease resentments and real hatreds; that could make the doubter believe and the hopeless hope again; that could purify the impure mind; that could persuade—ah, there it is—persuasion! that is the word; what or who is it that it couldn't persuade? The maniac of Domremy—the ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... of the master, DOING the things he says to them, you are of those Christians, if you WILL be called by the name, to whom he will say, I never knew you: go forth into the outer darkness. Then at least will the church be rid of you, and the honest doubter will have room to breathe the divine air of ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... being somewhere around Dry Lake, with a good team that you will drive for hire and some samples of oats and dry-land spuds and stuff that you raised on your claim—" She eyed him sharply for one so endearingly feminine. "Would you do it? There'd be a salary, and besides that a commission on each doubter you landed. And I'd just love to have you ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... English."] For this reason and also that this language cannot be learned simply as a matter of rote, but demands the exercise of the thinking and reasoning powers, [Footnote: To convince an opponent or a doubter of this, tell him that "utila" means "useful," and "mal" denotes the contrary; then ask what "malutila" means. The answer will almost certainly be "useless." Then show that the contrary of a good quality is not merely the absence of that quality, but is a bad quality, and therefore ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... he published his book. It will be recalled that the boy Robinson, accuser of the Lancashire women in 1634, had been brought into his Yorkshire congregation at an afternoon service and had come off very poorly when cross-questioned by the curious minister. From that time Webster had been a doubter. Now and again in the course of his Yorkshire and Lancashire pastorates he had come into contact with superstition. He was no philosopher, this Yorkshire doctor of souls and bodies, nor was he more than a country scientist, and his reasoning against witchcraft fell short—as Professor Kittredge ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... him, however, into strange conflict with his own character. His temperament was that of the ascetic and visionary religious. His intelligence had much the same acuteness and pliancy as that of another and more pronounced doubter—a South German also, like Father Benecke,—the author of the 'Leben Jesu.' But his character was the joint product of his temperament and his habits, and was often difficult to reconcile with the quick ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... for in America by Professor John W. Burgess of Columbia College. He tells us that they are the "salt of the earth," and "among the greatest thinkers, moralists, and philanthropists of the age." To overbear the doubter with the weight of such authority we are told that this defense has the support of the great theologian, Harnack, the sound and accomplished political scientist and economist, von Schmoller, the distinguished philologian, von Wilamowitz, the well-known historian, Lamprecht, the profound statesman, ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... story of the O'Iwa Inari, the Yotsuya Kwaidan, as a mere fairy tale or novel of the day. The shrine of the Tamiya Inari stands now to attest the truth of the tradition. Let the doubter but witness the faith of the believer in the powers of the fearful lady; and, if doubt still continues to exist, the salutary fear of others at ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... part of the war, I was a doubter of nobility in others and a sceptic as regards myself. The growth of my personal vision was complete when I recognised that the capacity of heroism is latent in everybody, and only awaits the bigness of the opportunity to call ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... the doubter, he was willing to admit that he had made a grevious error of judgment. Had he thought that Ziffak suspected his misgivings, he would have taken the fellow's hand, ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... ejaculation, he turns the whole thing upside down. In the end, you look into it and find that an admirable decision has been formed and, what is most important, a unanimous decision.... (In the division of land) the cries, the noise, the hubbub do not subside until everyone is satisfied and no doubter is left.[287] ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... the means of convincing the doubter. Etzooah lost his mask. His mouth dropped open; he stared at Stonor with wild eyes; a yellowish tint crept into the ruddy copper of his skin. This agitation was wholly disproportionate to what Mary was telling him. Stonor wondered afresh. Etzooah ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... of that, the philosophy of ready-made clothes applies as much to unbelief as to faith. Now and then one meets a mind distracted by genuine doubt, and it is refreshing and stimulating to grapple with its problems. One respects the doubter because the doubt fits him like the elastic silk; it seems a part and parcel of his personality. But at other times one can see at a glance that the doubter is all togged out in ready-made clothes, and, like a bird in borrowed plumes, is inordinately proud of them. Here are the same ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... inhibition of law, their methods were duly legalized. The explanation was not hard to find. These same propertied classes had made the code of laws as it stood; and if any doubter denies that laws at all times have exactly corresponded with the interest and aims of the ruling class, all that is necessary is to compare the laws of the different periods with the profitable methods of that class, and he will find that these ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... which brotherly sympathy suggests, who would not strive to recover such an one? If all other arts proved unavailing, it would remain for a man with the ordinary instincts of humanity, in silence and sorrow at least, to look on, while the solitary doubter was paying the ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... Condamnes et Bannia a Cause des Troubles des Pays Bas," in three, together with the Records of the "Conseil des Troubles," in forty-three folio volumes, in the Royal Archives at Brussels. After going through all these chronicles of iniquity, the most determined historic, doubter will ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... step by step, it has foretold the progress it would make. It comes, too, most triumphant. No faith before it ever took such a victorious stand in its very infancy. It has swept like a hurricane of fire through the land, compelling faith from the baffled scoffer, and the most determined doubter." ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... admiration for her tact and discretion, for the beautiful results of good-breeding. He congratulated himself on having such a friend as Adelaide Birkett. She would be of infinite advantage to Learn when his wife, and when he had persuaded that sweet doubter to believe in her and accept her as she was, and as he wished her to be accepted. As it was in the calendar of his wishes at this moment that Adelaide had never loved him, never wished to marry ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... should be dragged by a horse to the place of execution and burnt alive. We need not recall the penalties considered most suitable for the crime of religious difference—the rack, the fire, the boiling oil, the tearing pincers, the embrace of the spiky virgin, the sharpened edge of stone on which the doubter sat, with increasing weights tied to his feet, until his opinions upon heavenly mysteries should improve under the stress of pain. When we come to rebellion, the ordinance of English law was more express. In the case of a woman, the penalty was the same as ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... in clearness. The Spiritual World as it stands is full of perplexity. One can escape doubt only by escaping thought. With regard to many important articles of religion perhaps the best and the worst course at present open to a doubter is simple credulity. Who is to answer for this state of things? It comes as a necessary tax for improvement on the age in which we live. The old ground of faith, Authority, is given up; the new, Science, has not yet taken ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond |
