"Negation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the case of a man who handled an objection of that sort by first smiling while shaking his head and making a gesture of negation, and then said, "I could not lose much for you, but if I were reckless or irresponsible I certainly would lose for myself this opportunity that you see I want very much. I have a great deal more at stake than you. You may be sure I shall not risk losing my chance ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... objection to the present form of the Trinity is, that it is not only scholastic, or purely intellectual, but that it is also negative. It is not even a positive doctrine. It is often charged against Unitarianism, that it is a mere negation; and, in one sense, the charge is well founded. Unitarianism is a negation, so far as it is a mere piece of reasoning against Orthodoxy; but, as asserting the divine Unity, it is very positive, But the doctrine of the Trinity is a mere negation, as it is usually held; because it is an empty form ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... scholar of Eton; a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge; he won the Greek and Latin Odes in 1820, and the Greek Ode again in 1821. To him, therefore, the classic spirit was inborn, and a training that omitted the study of Latin and Greek the very negation of education. He would have had something very trenchant to say of what is now known as "the modern side." He wrote a very rich and splendid prose, and it is no fond family partiality that leads me to quote to you his eloquent and precious ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... question of an infatuated fool, and put in an infatuated fool's way. For, if she were a "deep one," how could he hope to get the truth? But her answer reassured him. "No," she said—her simple, direct negation that had a convincing power ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... cousin may be the most innocent soul alive. She is born to a ready-made situation, and accepts it. But it is a situation which I, if I am to be loyal to my tradition, cannot accept. It is the negation of my tradition. I am obliged to submit to it, but I can't accept it. My cousin is the embodiment of the anti-tradition. You say—marry her. That is like inviting the Pope to ally himself ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... to teach them a certain measure of self-restraint and piety, Islam cannot carry them on to the higher development of human life and thought. It is repressive of freedom, and the reason is that its doctrine is after all no more than negative. Allah is but a negation of other gods; there is no store of positive riches in his character, he does not sympathise with the manifold growth of human activity; the inspiration he affords is a negative inspiration, an impulse of hostility to what is over against him, not an impulse ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... there, rotting like some infernal yeast? What terrible energy, what malignant, vindictive lust infected that place? What distorted, unhappy soul first sickened there? How long ago? How long ago? Are there centres of negation? Oh, I tell you, the table-tippers are harmless beside the sickening truths, the simply incredible possibilities of this little crevice ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... (for she had specialised in travelling Englishmen) could not re-establish her conviction as to the sameness of men. The presence of her professed rivals of various nationalities in the Promenade could not restore it either. The Promenade in its cold, prim languor was the very negation of desire. She was afraid. She foresaw ruin for herself in this London, inclement, ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... the law there is such a fiction—a beautiful negation, indeed—but we know that Justice always holds the first place, and when she is satisfied, then we call in Mercy. Such, at least, is the wholesome practice and constitutional spirit of British law. I have now, gentlemen, rendered you every assistance ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... his eyes on David and made a feeble motion, scarcely more than a quiver of his hand, which seemed to express negation. ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... death for the simple reason that she died in a sure and certain faith and in strict obedience to the commands of the Gospel. Her whole life had been one of pure, disinterested love, of utter self-negation. Had her convictions been of a more enlightened order, her life directed to a higher aim, would that pure soul have been the more worthy of love and reverence? She accomplished the highest and best achievement in this world: she died without ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... debt of gratitude. Neither Engel Freund nor John Hecker professed any religious faith. The latter was never in the habit of attending any place of worship. Both were Lutheran so far as their antecedents could make them so, but neither seems to have practically known much beyond the flat negation, or at best the simple disregard, of Christianity to which Protestantism leads more or less quickly according as the logical faculty is more or less developed in those whose minds have been fed upon it. However, there was nothing ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... of those metaphysical and theological systems which it is destined to supersede. And yet it will be found that, in so far as it differs at all from the Inductive Science of Bacon, it is purely negative, since its chief characteristic is the negation of all Theology, and the entire exclusion from the domain of human knowledge, of Causes, whether efficient or final. It adds nothing to the sum of human thought which might not be reached by Bacon's method; it only subtracts whatever has reference to the Divine and Supernatural, and especially ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... blown Baltic with their clubbed sounds —than their opposite (Silence her sacred self) is multiplied and rendered more intense by numbers, and by sympathy. She too hath her deeps, that call unto deeps. Negation itself hath a positive more and less; and closed eyes would seem to obscure the ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... incoherences, and again it is not so mathematically one that it cannot allow each being to become individualized to a certain degree. But it forms a single whole, none the less; and we have to choose between the out-and-out negation of finality and the hypothesis which co-ordinates not only the parts of an organism with the organism itself, but also each living being with the ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... a chuckling tribute of his resolution, he received the incredulity of his nephew as additional indorsement when the latter made his appearance that evening, accompanied by the colorless negation of a man whom he could scarcely persuade himself to ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... heard above the general hubbud of music, voices, and battering of bronze. "Citizens," he said, "the 26th of Floreal will be memorable in our history. Thus we triumph over military despotism, that bloody negation of the rights of man. The First Empire placed the collar of servitude about our necks—it began and ended in carnage—and left us a legacy of a Second Empire, which was finally to end in the disgrace of Sedan." Much more he said, but his voice was drowned in the continued hammering of ...
— The Insurrection in Paris • An Englishman: Davy
... believes in a Divinity. A Jacobite believes in the divine right of Bishops. He that believes in the divine right of Bishops believes in the divine authority of the Christian religion. Therefore, Sir, a Jacobite is neither an Atheist nor a Deist. That cannot be said of a Whig; for Whiggism is a negation ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... that tragedy is not the conflict between right and wrong, but the conflict between right and right. The combat of Luther and Erasmus proceeded beyond the point at which our judgement is forced to halt and has to accept an equivalence, nay, a compatibility of affirmation and negation. And this fact, that they here were fighting with words and metaphors in a sphere beyond that of what may be known and expressed, was understood by Erasmus. Erasmus, the man of the fine shades, for whom ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... Legislature passed a law, by which Russians coming to Finland were to enjoy all the rights accruing to Finns without acquiring Finnish citizenship. A serious question of principle is involved in this new measure, since it amounts to the negation of a separate Finnish citizenship, which has hitherto been recognised by the Russian rulers even in their dealings with foreign powers. One of the obvious motives for this law is to make it possible to appoint Russian officials to Finnish posts. Several such appointments ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... to it that we do struggle. Now come the ignorant and the socialists, demanding that the state step in and roll back the very laws of creation by supplying what is not earned from the surplus of the strong. Who cannot see anarchy looming ahead of this programme, for it is surely a lunatic negation of all the laws of God and Nature? They do not seem to see either in America or in England that state supervision carried too far leads straight to the sanction of all the demands of socialism and syndicalism. Legislation was never intended to be the father ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... struck him how strangely inverted these thoughts were; what an utter negation of his waking thoughts, as they flashed through his mind while Garthorne was speaking. They seemed perfectly reasonable to him, and—so subtle was the miracle wrought by those two spoonsful ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... but Mr. Eldon is a gentleman—he can never exact his legal rights to the full extent. He has too much delicacy of feeling for that.' Adela glanced at her mother with a curious openness of look—the expression which by apparent negation of feeling reveals feeling of special significance. Mrs. Waltham caught the glance and checked ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... digest thy food? Come; permit me to examine thy teeth. Yes, by my soul; therein lies the secret. Thou hast a toothache and decline to complain, thinking that, by thy silence, I shall be saved a dentist's bill." But Pablo shook his head in negation. "Come!" roared old Don ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... Moors from the peninsula. Holland found herself in the heroic struggle against Spain in the 16th century. But the practice of conducting wars by hiring foreign mercenaries, a sure sign that the nationalist spirit is weak, continued till much later. And the dynastic principle, which is the very negation of nationalism, actually culminated in the 18th century; and this is the true explanation of the feeble resistance which Europe offered to the French revolutionary armies, until Napoleon stirred up ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... means stupid,' returned Rudin, 'but he is on the wrong path. I don't know whether you will agree with me, Darya Mihailovna, but in negation—in complete and universal negation—there is no salvation to be found? Deny everything and you will easily pass for a man of ability; it's a well-known trick. Simple-hearted people are quite ready to conclude ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... is the most nakedly iniquitous. Tyrants have often substituted their own will for the ordered procedure of a tribunal, but no tyrant before ever went through the atrocious farce of deliberately making a tribunal the organised negation of security for justice. Couthon laid its theoretic base in a fallacy that must always be full of seduction to shallow persons in authority: 'He who would subordinate the public safety to the inventions ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... everywhere, and moving as he moves, may have some small share in giving to the savage a vague idea of his duality. It needs but to watch a child's interest in the movements of its shadow, and to remember that at first a shadow cannot be interpreted as a negation of light, but is looked upon as an entity, to perceive that the savage may very possibly consider it as a specific something which forms part of him. 2. A much more decided suggestion of the same kind is likely to result from ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... mastered his hand, and looked up in his face with a whole soul of negation in her wistful eyes. 'No, no, no—just ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was with these 'new ways of worship and new forms of love' that the mind began to be perpetually occupied. The break with the old things was no sooner complete than the eager soul, incapable then, as always, of resting in negation or opposition, pressed passionately forward to a new synthesis, not only speculative, but practical. Before it rose perpetually the haunting vision of another palace of faith—another church or company of the faithful, which was to become the shelter of human aspiration ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Born in the stronghold of squirearchical prejudices, nursed amid the trivial platitudes that then passed in England for philosophy, his keen spirit flew to the opposite pole of thought with a recoil that carried him at first to inconsiderate negation. His passionate love of liberty, his loathing for intolerance, his impatience of control for self and others, and his vivid logical sincerity, combined to make him the Quixotic champion of extreme opinions. He was too fearless to be wise, too precipitate ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... and consciousness duty must be a chimera; our pleasures and our passions should be the guides of conduct, and virtue is indeed a superstition if life ends at the grave. This is the conclusion which the philosophy of negation must accept at last. Such is the felicity of those degrading precepts which make the epitaph the end. If the life of Burnes is as a taper that is burned out then we treasure his memory and his ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... no creation of his own consciousness but rather imposed upon it as an eternal law, he rises past Zeus to the Potency above him, after which even the undeveloped sense of a Caliban blindly felt when he discovered a Quiet above the bitter god Setebos; but the Quiet of Caliban is a negation of those evil attributes of the supreme Being, which he reflects upwards from his own gross heart, not the energy of righteousness which Ixion demands in his transcendent "Potency." Into this poem went ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... deduction than an empirical correlation ascertained only by accumulated observations. Premising that by rational correlation is not meant one in which we can trace, or think we can trace, a design, but one of which the negation is inconceivable (and this is the species of correlation which Cuvier's principle implies); then we hold that our knowledge of the correlation is of a more certain kind than where it is simply inductive. We think that Professor Huxley, in his anxiety to avoid the error of making ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... a little confiding, snuggling movement, and she continued: "You must believe, because I have thought it all out, whereas to you it is new. If I were a proper-spirited girl"—she rebuked his negation with a gesture—"if I were a proper-spirited girl I know I should leave Mrs. Chater at once—walk out and not care what I might suffer rather than stay where I had been insulted. Girls in books would do it. Oh, Georgie, this ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... of no other creatures that inhabit the earth than man and beast; and in all cases, where only two things offer themselves, and one must be admitted, a negation proved on any one, amounts to an affirmative on the other; and therefore, Mr. Burke, by proving against the Rights of Man, proves in behalf of the beast; and consequently, proves that government is a beast; and as difficult things sometimes explain each other, we now see the origin of ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... as to the Void, which is later in order than the texts which it negatives. On the other hand the assertion as to the Void being the universal principle is not liable to subsequent sublation; for it is impossible for any negation to go beyond it. And as to resting on a vicious basis, there is in that respect no difference between Perception and the other means of knowledge, and the view of general unreality, founded on the Vedanta. The proper conclusion therefore is that all cognitions whatsoever ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... were directly ruled from Spain, or through the Spanish Governors of the viceroyalties. For theories of advancement, and as to whether certain arbitrary ideas of the rights of man, evolved in general by those who in their persons and their lives are the negation of all rights, I give a fico — yes, your fig of Spain — caring as little as did ancient Pistol for 'palabras', and holding that the best right that a man can have is to be happy after the way that pleases him the most. And that the Jesuits rendered the Indians happy is certain, though to those ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... the honest Atheist, with his passionate impulse to strip the truth bare, is constantly and unwittingly reproducing the divine likeness. It will be interesting here to call a witness or so to the extreme instability of absolute negation. ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... taken to decorating their places of worship, and Trinity Church (by H.H. Richardson), and the new Old South Church, are ambitious and beautiful pieces of ecclesiastical architecture. But the old Old South Meeting-House, the ecclesiastical centre of the city, is the flat and somewhat sour negation of all that is expressed or implied in an English cathedral. Let me not be understood to disparage the Old South or the spirit which fashioned it. In my eyes, minster and meeting-house are equally interesting historic monuments, and ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... just enough her senior to command her childish obedience; and there were certain qualities in his nature which were eminently calculated to win and keep the respect of women as well as of men. He was the very incarnation of sincerity, and had now and again, in certain ways, a sublime self-negation which, at times, seemed in startling contrast to a manifestly militant nature. When at school he had often been involved in fights which were nearly always on matters of principle, and by a sort of unconscious ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... determine only one place in logical space: nevertheless the whole of logical space must already be given by it. (Otherwise negation, logical sum, logical product, etc., would introduce more and more new elements in co-ordination.) (The logical scaffolding surrounding a picture determines logical space. The force of a proposition reaches through the whole ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein
... arrangements should be very strange. Instead of this, the house, gloomy and sparsely furnished as it was, was clean and in order. It lacked everything to make it pleasant—air, sunshine, and any cheerful token of comfort; but it was only in this dreary negation that it failed; there was no positive fault to be found even with the atmosphere of the kitchen and bare lobby through which he was conducted, and he discovered, to his surprise, that he was to be entertained in a small parlour, which had a round polished centre table, on which lay ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... "Is self-negation to be all on her part?" The thought, flashing through his mind, changed the current of his feelings, and gave him ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... shamest not thy kindred, Nor disgrace thy husband's household. "Village-maidens oft will ask thee, Mothers of the hamlet question: 'Does thy husband's mother greet thee As in childhood thou wert greeted, In thy happy home in Pohya?' Do not answer in negation, Say that she has always given Thee the best of her provisions, Given thee the kindest greetings, Though it be but once a season. "Listen well to what I tell thee: As thou goest from thy father To thy husband's distant dwelling, Thou must not forget ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... Rome. For the Buddhist monastic rule requires its members to be homeless, celibate, vegetarian, and here, like Luther, Shinran joined issue with them. To his mind the attainment of man lay in the harmonious development of body and spirit, and in the fulfilment, not the negation of the ordinary human duties. Accordingly, in his thirty-first year, after deep consideration, he married the daughter of Prince Kujo Kanezane, Chief Minister of the Emperor and head of one of the greatest houses in Japan, ...
— Buddhist Psalms • Shinran Shonin
... negro as a man permanently upon the rack, who is to be punished just as much as he will bear without diminishing his pecuniary value. And the allotted method of punishment is hard work, hard fare, the liberal use of the whip, and a general negation of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... New Comedy arose out of a mere negation, the abolition, viz., of the old political freedom, we may easily conceive that there would be an interval of fluctuating, and tentative efforts to supply its place, before a new comic form could be developed and fully established. Hence there may ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... him—-"this idle and often cowardly as well as ignorant harping! Why should we not change like everything else? In fiction, in poetry, in so much of both, French as well as English, and, I am told, in American art and literature, the shadow of death—call it what you will, despair, negation, indifference—is upon us. But what fools who talk thus! Why, amico mio, you know as well as I that death is life, just as our daily, our momentarily dying body is none the less alive and ever recruiting new forces of existence. Without death, which is our crapelike churchyardy word ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... affirmative states of mind are those which, particularly belong to women; as iconoclasts they are mere echoes. This affirmative condition is most favorable to true development. Nothing good has ever come of mere negation. But we must look for our truths and our basis of true growth, in the light of the rising dawn—not, as heretofore, in the waning glory of the setting sun. The union of clubs is the natural outgrowth, of the planting of the true club idea. It was a little seed, but it contained the ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... find the happy medium between absolute negation and dangerous credulity? Is it reasonable either to deny everything we do not comprehend, or to accept all the fantasies engendered in the vortex of disordered imaginations? Can we not achieve at the same ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... disappears. And here, indeed, we may see illustrated, the distinctive peculiarity of the German method of procedure in these matters—the bastard a priori method, as it may be termed. The legitimate a priori method sets out with propositions of which the negation is inconceivable; the a priori method as illegitimately applied, sets out either with propositions of which the negation is not inconceivable, or with propositions like Oken's, of which the ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... in negation, as they drove into the bar of light from the kitchen window and stopped. Marche got down very stiffly. The kitchen door opened at the same moment, and a woman's figure appeared in the lamplight—a young girl, slender, bare armed, ...
— Blue-Bird Weather • Robert W. Chambers
... conceive, a correct representation of the terms, we have to inquire, where lies the alleged incompatibility of prescience and freedom? Between freedom and necessity there is, we admit, an absolute and irreconcilable discrepancy and opposition; for the assertion of the one is a direct negation of the other. What is free cannot be necessitated, and what is necessitated cannot be free. But prescience involves no such opposition. For simple knowledge is not coercive; it is not impulse; it is not influence of any kind: it is merely acquaintance ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... was to serve religion and monarchy. But even the works of those who confessed such principles were not in harmony with themselves. One can say that it pleased the authors to understand their activity in that way, but the reading masses could understand it and often understood it as a negation ...
— So Runs the World • Henryk Sienkiewicz,
... category, and comparing them one with another, find that some possess more of being or reality than others, we, to this extent, say that some are more perfect than others. Again, in so far as we attribute to them anything implying negation - as term, end, infirmity, etc., we, to this extent, call them imperfect, because they do not affect our mind so much as the things which we call perfect, not because they have any intrinsic deficiency, or because Nature has blundered. For nothing lies within the scope of a thing's nature, ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... side, on the other hand.] Counter Evidence — N. counter evidence; evidence on the other side, evidence on the other hand; conflicting evidence, contradictory evidence, opposing evidence; disproof, refutation &c 479; negation &c 536. plea &c 617; vindication &c 937; counter protest; 'tu quoque' argument; other side of the shield, other side of the coin, reverse of the shield. V. countervail, oppose; mitigate against; rebut &c (refute) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... of any other science. From Pythagoras to Herbert Spencer, every one had done it, although commonly science had explored an ocean which it preferred to regard as Unity or a Universe, and called Order. Even Hegel, who taught that every notion included its own negation, used the negation only to reach a "larger synthesis," till he reached the universal which thinks itself, contradiction and all. The Church alone had constantly protested that anarchy was not order, that Satan was not God, ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... ALWAYS HARMFUL.—There is no period in life when constipation can be borne with impunity. Youth, with its virility and vitality, will endure its consequences with an apparent negation, so far as positive or specific results are concerned, but it is only an apparent impunity. There is always a certain amount of strength built up, held in reserve as a heritage of youth, which will withstand a certain amount of physical license, but if this reserve ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... "has naturally and properly employed a variety of phrases to bring his meaning more forcibly home, he will, I presume, allow that they are all equivalent; and that what he means by a necessary truth, would be sufficiently defined, a proposition the negation of which is not only false, but inconceivable. I am unable to find in any of Mr Whewell's expressions, turn them what way you will, a meaning beyond this, and I do not believe he would contend that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... was no symbol or analogy that presented itself. It was not even by negation that he thought. There was just one positive element that included all: time seemed to mean nothing, the ticks of the clock with the painted face were scarcely consecutive; it was all one, and distance was nothing, nor nearness—not even the ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... This was the Convent de la Visitation. Its pious nuns had taken the vow never to look upon the face of man. If, as they paced under the great oaks of their close, or the stately length of their cloisters telling their beads, or meditating on the negation of earthly existence and the perfect joys of the future, they heard an echo of the conflict that was shaking Europe, it was only to utter a prayer that the souls of those who had obeyed the call of their country ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... heritage from the Hebrew, whilst the modern astrologer claims that the astrology of to-day is once more a revelation of the Chaldean and Assyrian religions. But polytheism—whether in its gross form of many gods, of planetary angels, or in the more subtle form of pantheism,—is the very negation of sane religion; and astrology is the ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... found; it indeed proves that such a task is difficult, and the success of it, to a particular, most precarious; accident, however, may bring about what the greatest industry has not been able to attain. Secondly, there is good reason to believe that this asserted negation is not absolutely true; for I have in my possession what I consider as proof of the contrary; I found it in Wales, and I think it is in what may be considered as primitive mountains;—it is the mark of shells in ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... round, and made a spirit-jail secure, By the mere horror of blank Naught-at-all, Whose circumambience doth these ghosts enthral. A lurid thought is growthless, dull Privation, 35 Yet that is but a Purgatory curse; Hell knows a fear far worse, A fear—a future state;—'tis positive Negation! ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... not defend the Protestant religion; they perverted it and debased it by subjecting it to the Prussian State. Such subjection is the negation of Protestantism, as it is the negation of Christianity. Christianity in a political sense has always meant the separation of the spiritual and the temporal powers. It is the essence of Anglo-Saxon Protestantism that it actually does protest. ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... American writer, born in New York; a busy writer in fiction, biography (Balzac), and philosophy, e. g. "The Philosophy of Disenchantment" and "The Anatomy of Negation," studies in a somewhat cheerful pessimism; ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... she looked proud! Through all her sweetness, all her dignity, all her high-souled negation of self which I had known, and which never seemed more marked than now—through all the fire that seemed to shine from the dark depths of her eyes into my very soul, pride shone conspicuously. The ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... consciousness the girl had flown to his arms when he came to the hut. And that was all their love-making, two blissful moments of delirium wrenched from a time of a gaunt tragedy, and followed by a few hours of self-negation. Yet they sufficed—to the man—and the woman is never too ready to count the cost when ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... first news of the occurrences in Paris, Kossuth asked in the Lower House for the creation of a responsible ministry. The motion was favorably received, but in the Upper House it was rejected, the Government not being yet alive to the real state of affairs, and still hoping by a system of negation to frustrate the wishes of the people. But very soon the revolution reared its head in Vienna itself, and the wishes of the Hungarian people, uttered at Budapest, received thereby a new and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... conferred on us. That non-co-operation is negative is merely a half-truth. Non-co-operation with the government means greater co-operation among ourselves, greater mutual dependence among the many different castes and classes of our country. Non-co-operation is not mere negation. It will lead to the recovery of the lost art of co-operation among ourselves. Long dependence on an outside government which by its interference suppressed or prevented the consequences of our differences has made us forget the duty of mutual trust and the art of friendly adjustment. ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... empire. Many of the illustrious patriots of the Great Parliament saw this; and felt the necessity of abolishing a maxim so fatal to the just liberties of the people. But some of them fell into the opposite error of supposing that this abolition could be effected only by the direct negation of it; their maxim accordingly was—'The king can do wrong,' i.e. is responsible in his own person. In this great error even the illustrious wife of Colonel Hutchinson participated; [1] and accordingly she taxes those of her ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... holding up his grave patience, his bleeding, his most eloquent refusals, for her wonder. Wonder, indeed, she did, and much more than that. The thought sat upon her like a brooding evil spirit, frayed her nerves to waste. He used to move her so much by this policy of negation that she found herself panting as she sat among her women; or when from her throned seat at table she saw his pale profile burn like a silver coin in the dusk, the pain of her heart's beating well-nigh made her suffocate. Her troubles ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... a mystery to herself no less than to others. The normal functions of her sex had dropped so far below her ken, in the course of her complicated development, as to seem negligible. Beginning with this negation, she had passed rapidly on to an attitude of universal scepticism, to which religion was merely a matter of taste, and prayer was a psychological phenomenon. She was not one to lend herself to the ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... sincere and orthodox Catholic, who holds that the negation of a dogma constitutes skepticism, should have called Byron a skeptic because he questioned the doctrine of eternal punishment, is not to be wondered at; but what is matter of astonishment is, that the reproach was addressed to him by the writer of "Faust," and by the writer ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... man became quieter, but he still refused to take the opiate. He closed his eyes and made no answer to Guy's repeated supplication. Finally he ceased shaking his head in negation, and at last breathed regularly ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... by the trifling of the literalists of Scripture interpretation, the Sadducee denied that there was an eternal world and a spiritual state, and asserted that "there is no resurrection, neither angel, nor spirit." But mere negation can never satisfy. The heart still moans out its sorrow under the darkness of agnosticism, as the ocean sighing under a starless midnight. Nature's instincts are more cogent than reason. It was hardly to ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... are obliged to limit infinite space; to represent to ourselves a change in time, we are obliged to divide the totality of time. Thus we only arrive at reality by limitation, at the positive, at a real position, by negation or exclusion; to determination, by the suppression ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... Materialist (that all the growth of the race, the struggling towards a higher life, the aspirations towards virtue shall absolutely vanish, and leave no trace), is a crushing mental burden which leads to absolute negation; it will show the spiritual nature of man in perfect consistence with the true theories, and as dependent on fundamental ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... overhung by the green leaves of an exuberant wild fig that has thrust its roots into the sturdy old walls. Here, at Manfredonia, we are already under the shadow of the holy mountain and the archangel's wings, but the usual representations of him are childishly emasculate—the negation of his divine and heroic character. This one portrays a genuine warrior-angel of the old type: grave and grim. Beyond this castle and the town-walls, which are best preserved on the north side, nothing in Manfredonia ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... strongly that many of these representatives of enormous corporate wealth have themselves been responsible for a portion of the conditions against which Bryanism is in ignorant revolt. I do not believe that it is wise or safe for us as a party to take refuge in mere negation and to say that there are no evils to be corrected. It seems to me that our attitude should be one of correcting the evils and thereby showing that, whereas the Populists, Socialists, and others really do not correct the evils at all, or else only do ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... remonstrance as a duty of the Portuguese Government. "Nor," he continued, "ought the Government oL Portugal to stop here. It ought, as we have said, to go further; because from what his countrymen say of Livingstone—and to which he only answers by a mere vain negation,—from what he unhesitatingly declares of himself and his intentions, and from what must be known to the Government by private information from, their delegates, it is obvious that such men as Livingstone may become extremely prejudicial to the interests of Portugal, ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... of nothing but politics: he had no feeling of poetry. There was never a more complete negation of sympathy, than between him ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... frozen—on this phantasmagorical planet, that whirls in beginningless time through endless space! Let us trust, for the honor of God, that the contradictory creeds for which men have died are all true. Perhaps humor—your right Hegelian touchstone to which everything yields up its latent negation, passing on to its own contradiction—gives truer lights and shades than your pedantic Philistinism. Is Truth really in the cold white light, or in the shimmering interplay of the rainbow tints that fuse in it? Bah! Your Philistine critic will sum me up after I am dead ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... joker" had been sneaked into its mass of lawyers' terminology. The surreptitious clause ran to this effect: That railroad companies were permitted to exact from their employees overtime work for extra compensation. This practically made the whole law a negation. ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... and poor!" cries Ethel, with a flush on her face, and tears starting in her eyes. "The Colonel went to her like a kind, dear, good brave uncle as he is. The very day I go to Newcome I'll go to see her." She caught a look of negation in her father's eye. "I will go—that is, if papa will give me leave," says Miss Ethel, adding simply, "if we had gone sooner there would not have been all this abuse of us in the papers." To which statement her worldly father and brother perforce agreeing, we ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... of converting religion into outward actions has its root in us all, and is not annihilated by our rejection of an elaborate ceremonial. There is much significance in the double negation of my text, 'Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision.' If the Judaisers were tempted to insist on the former, as indispensable, their antagonists were as much tempted to insist on the latter. The one were saying, 'A man cannot be a Christian ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... a copy of a picture-paper. He surveyed its illustrations with studious intentness for five minutes, and then laid the paper on the seat beside him. Miss Clarkson again fled to sanctuary in her novel, wondering how long pure negation could enlist interest. ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... himself, though covered over with clear sunshine? And the picture of a shadow is a positive thing. Indeed, we have negative names, to which there be no positive ideas; but they consist wholly in negation of some certain ideas, as SILENCE, INVISIBLE; but these signify not any ideas in the mind but ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... these years is that I had a secret from him which I guarded to the end. I believe he never suspected it, though of this I'm not absolutely sure. If he had so much as an inkling the line he had taken, the line of absolute negation of the matter to himself, shows an immense effort of the will. I may at last lay bare my secret, giving it for what it is worth; now that the main sufferer has gone, that he has begun to be alluded to as one of the famous early dead and that his wife has ceased to survive him; now, too, ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... overlooking all the countryside, with subtle flickers of laughter running athwart its wonted contortions, more weird and sinister in this ghastly glare than by day? And what significance might attend these strange machinations? Revolving the idea, he presently shook his head in conclusive negation as he rode along. The approach of raiders was silent and noiseless and secret. Whatever the mystery might portend it was not thus that they would advertise their presence, promoting the escape of the objects of their search. ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... and its negation are beaten up inextricably together. But if the life be good, the negation of it must be bad. Yet the two are equally essential facts of existence; and all natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... apparition with the seal of Solomon, and the friar, doffing cowl and gown, steps forward as a cavalier (an itinerant scholar in Goethe). He introduces himself as a part of the power that, always thinking evil, as persistently accomplishes good—the spirit of negation. The speech ("Son lo Spirito che nega sempre") is one of the striking numbers of Boito's score, and the grim humor of its "No! "seems to have inspired the similar effect in Falstaff's discourse on honor in Verdi's opera. ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... that the Bible is—like any other book! Here is the sceptical fellow of a College, conspiring with six others, to produce a volume of which Germany itself, (having changed its mind,) would already be ashamed!... Mr. Jowett is enthusiastic for a negation! Without belief himself, he cannot rest because Christendom has, on the whole, a good deal of belief remaining! If he may but unsettle somebody's mind,—his Essay will have achieved its purpose, and its author ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... the necessary qualification which every man who values truth must make when asserting such a negation,—viz., to the very best of my memory and belief,—I never set eyes on him nor heard of him until now, in the whole course of my life. Not a member of my family or of the legation has the faintest recollection of any such person. I am quite convinced that he never saw ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... presentation of that reiterated visage seemed suddenly to explain everything to me. I felt at once the stupidity of any appeal, and the instant necessity for every kind of appeal. I felt the negation, the sudden slipping into insignificant unimportance of the whole of the Western world—and, at the same time, the dismissal of the East. "No longer my masters" a voice seemed to cry from the very heart of that multitude. "No longer will we halt at your command, no longer will your words ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... ranks and societies he always esteemed highly. "I am a friend to subordination," he said, "as most conducive to the happiness of society." He was a Jacobite and Tory to the end. Whiggism was the offspring of the devil, the "negation of all principle"; and he seems to have implied that it led to atheism, which he regarded as the worst of sins. He did not believe in the honesty of republicans; they levelled down, but were never inclined to level up. Men, he felt, had a part to act ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... assertion of the right of Congress under the Articles of Confederation to interfere with the jurisdiction of the States over Indians within their limits, but rather a negation of it. They refused to interfere with the subject, and referred it under a general recommendation back to the State, to be disposed of ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, - Vol. 2, Part 3, Andrew Jackson, 1st term • Edited by James D. Richardson
... covered every description of madness from the French legitimism of De Ripert-Monclar to the Republicanism of Landor. Intellectually he may be said to have had a zest for heresies. It is difficult to impute an attitude of mere impenetrable negation to a man who had expressed with sympathy the religion of "Caliban" and the morality of "Time's Revenges." It is true that at this time of the first popular interest in spiritualism a feeling existed among many people of a practical turn of mind, which can only be called a superstition ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... not infinite after its kind: for, of a thing infinite only after its kind, infinite attributes may be denied; but that which is absolutely infinite, contains in its essence whatever expresses reality, and involves no negation. ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... word "fame" never signifies simply notoriety. The meaning of the direct term may be seen from its negation or opposite, for only the meanest of men are called infamous. They are utterly without fame, utterly nameless; but if fame implied only notoriety, then infamous would possess no marked significance. Fame is an undertaker that pays but little attention to the living, but who ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... should watch and wait before the closed secret of a sarcastic woman's face, as if it were the shrine of the doubtfully benignant deity who ruled his destiny. For a young enthusiast is unable to imagine the total negation in another mind of the emotions which are stirring his own: they may be feeble, latent, inactive, he thinks, but they are there—they may be called forth; sometimes, in moments of happy hallucination, he believes they may be there in all the greater strength because he ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... hand. "You don't see her exactly as WE see?—you mean to say you don't now—NOW? She's as big as a blazing fire! Only look, dearest woman, LOOK—!" She looked, even as I did, and gave me, with her deep groan of negation, repulsion, compassion—the mixture with her pity of her relief at her exemption—a sense, touching to me even then, that she would have backed me up if she could. I might well have needed that, for with this hard blow of the proof that her eyes were hopelessly sealed ...
— The Turn of the Screw • Henry James
... It constructs systems, it creates artificial logic, and all those formulas which we now use by the force of habit, as if they were natural to us. But spontaneous intuition is the true logic of nature,—instant, direct, and infallible. It is a primitive affirmation which implies no negation, and therefore yields positive knowledge. To reflect is to return to that which was. It is, by the aid of memory, to return to the past, and to render it present to the eye of consciousness. Reflection, therefore, creates nothing; it supposes ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... head, but the negation seemed qualified by the whimsical smile she gave him. "None whatever," she said—and on the instant the talk was extinguished by the entrance ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... limitation of the universal, whether by "Existence" or by "Haecceity." [7] John and Thomas are individuals by virtue of their integral humanity, and not by fractional limitation of humanity. Dobbin is an actual positive horse (Entitas tota). Not a negation, by limitation, of universal equiety (Negatio). Not an individuation, by actual existence, of a non-existent but essential and universal horse (Existentia). Nor yet a horse only by limitation ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... is the negation of all socialism; the death of civilisation. And civilisation has an immortal destiny; and that destiny ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... kindly emit the usual negation," I went on.... "It seems to be carried.... It is carried. The chairman will proceed to the reading of the ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... would atone in many ways. And Lady Elliston, all with sweetest discretion, had asked gentle questions. Some of them Amabel had not understood; some she had. She remembered now that her own silence or dull negation might have seemed very rude and ungrateful; yet Lady Elliston had taken no offence. All her memories of Lady Elliston were of this tact and sweetness, this penetrating, tentative tact and sweetness that sought to understand and help and that drew back, unflurried and unprotesting before rebuff, ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... Therefore it is that, as has been truly said, "his love-ditties are, as it were, like flowers, beautiful in form and rich in hues, but without the scent that breathes to the heart." We seek in them in vain for the tenderness, the negation of self, the passion and the pathos, which are the soul of ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... of all this, rid of it, fairly started on the road of negation of social being, negation of recognised existence, infected him like a madness. But even the most forceful human will must bend to stupidities of detail and of material fact. Unexpected delays had occurred. The yacht was not ready for sea, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... look big, and express contempt or courage. With the hands, we solicit, we refuse, we promise, we threaten, we dismiss, we invite, we in treat, we express aversion, fear, doubting, denial, asking, affirmation, negation, joy, grief, confession, penitence. With the hands we describe, and point out all circumstances of time, place and manner of what we relate; we excite the passions of others, and soothe them: we approve and disapprove, permit or prohibit, admire ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... love, all pity for poor suffering humanity. But in spite of this, or rather because of it, every Christian really worthy the name, hates, and must hate, the Atheists, who appear to him the living negation of all love and all pity. Thus the god of love becomes the god of hate, the god of persecution; the product of the phantasy of man becomes a real cause of his suffering. So we must make an end of this phantasmagoria. Since in Divinity ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... I had felt myself drawn very much towards the venerable missionary. His gentleness, yet firmness of manner, his utter negation of self and devotedness to his Master's cause were very remarkable. His tender love for his daughter, too, was very beautiful. She returned it with the deepest affection and devotion. Accustomed as I had ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... frost which had crisped the white arches of the grass in his dooryard. All day he sat and watched the maple cast its glory, and did not bother much with his simple meals. The Wise house was erected on three terraces. Always through the dry summer the grass was burned to an ugly negation of color. Later, when rain came, the grass was a brilliant green, patched with rosy sorrel and golden stars of arnica. Then later still came the diamond brilliance of the frost. So dry were the terraces in summer-time that no flowers would flourish. ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... return towards the most common individualism, advocated by all the would-be superior minorities, to which indeed man owes in his history precisely the state and the rest, which these individualists combat. Their individualism goes so far as to end in a negation of their own starting-point,—to say nothing of the impossibility for the individual to attain a really full development in the conditions of oppression of the masses by the "beautiful aristocracies.'' His development ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... To affirm: hand, palm down, makes movement of affirmation up and down; (b) to deny: hand, palm down, makes movement of negation from ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... reassure him, for the paintings he speaks of in glowing terms—notably "the full-length portrait of a young girl," which he overwhelms me by comparing to Velasquez, as well as the two life-size portraits in black, "in which there is an almost entire negation of colour" (though I, who am, he says, a colourist, did not know it)—are my latest works, and ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... had begun to compile a list of the best authors we should have had to leave out most of their works. Nearly all the classics would have gone by the board. What havoc we should have made with the British poets! The Elizabethan dramatists would mostly have fallen under the ban of our negation, to a play, if not to a man. Chaucer, but for a few poems, is impossible; Spenser's poetry is generally duller than the Presidents' messages before Mr. Roosevelt's time; Milton is a trial of the spirit in three-fourths ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... their organization and habits, physical and mental, as to mark them as a peculiar family of the Red Type of man. Adopting this idea of unity as a basis of study, there are, at least, fewer obstacles in grouping the phenomena from which our deductions are to be drawn. The proof of negation is not the strongest proof, but it is something to assert that they are neither of Japhetic or Hamitic origin. In the traditions of one of the most celebrated North American tribes, namely, the Iroquois, the continent or "island," as ...
— Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... thrust out his hand in a passionate gesture of negation. "The generosity would have been on your part and the sacrifice, too! What does it matter who your own people were? You are yourself, the bravest, finest, truest girl in all the world! I knew you couldn't care, but, oh, I hoped that if there was no one else you would try to like ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... up and brushed herself again. She knew it must be dinner-time. The fact had been at the back of her mind all through these minutes of comforting negation. She should have been in the house laying the table while her mother cooked the meal. It was the first time in years that she had rebelled against a duty. It was not exactly rebellion now. It was something ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... everything," replied Helen, with something suspiciously like a sob, while her aunt broke her pledge to the extent of shaking her head with a gesture of negation. "It—it makes it worse for me. I dare not bid him go away, and I grow horribly ashamed because—because it hurts one to be conscious of so heavy a debt. Besides, he is consoling ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... went on, speaking with great precision, "it's quite impossible for me to make any such agreement with you—utterly impossible." He looked his adversary squarely in the eye, and shook his head in emphatic negation. ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... to be disputed that the old often appear dull-witted, but I cannot believe in a real darkening of the reason, which is a bright spark of the Divine, and even in madness the negation of reason is only external and apparent. A deaf man playing on an instrument out of tune may strike the right notes, and be inwardly persuaded that his execution is faultless, while all around him hear nothing ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... a hand at him in negation. "No, everybody doesn't have it made. Almost everybody's bogged down. That's the trouble Sam. The guts have been taken out of us. And ninety-nine people out of a hundred don't care. They've got bread and butter security. They've got trank to keep them happy. And they've ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds |
