"Negation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... done no more than turn in a circle; that where he believes that he has discovered new truth, he has merely strayed on to the track of a buried illusion. In the case I have named, for the poet to have taught us more than experience teaches, he should have ventured still further, perhaps, in the negation of justice. But whatever our opinion may be on this point, it at least is clear that the poet who desires his hypotheses to be legitimate, and of service, must take heed that they be not too manifestly contrary to the experience of everyday life; for in that case they become useless ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... on the other side, on the other hand.] Counter Evidence — N. counter evidence; evidence on the other side, evidence on the other hand; conflicting evidence, contradictory evidence, opposing evidence; disproof, refutation &c 479; negation &c 536. plea &c 617; vindication &c 937; counter protest; 'tu quoque' argument; other side of the shield, other side of the coin, reverse of the shield. V. countervail, oppose; mitigate against; rebut &c (refute) 479; subvert &c (destroy) 162; cheek, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... difference. The general feeling among these is against the coloured race being educated and evangelized.... Only what can and must be said is this, that the Laws of the English Colonies are just; those of the Boer States are the negation of every right, civil and religious, which the black man ought to have." I have similar testimonies from missionaries (not Englishmen); but I regret to say that these good men hesitate to have their names published,—not from selfish reasons,—but from love of their missionary work ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler
... philosophy, the philosophy of eternal sleep, without dreams and without awakening. This belief is wholly divorced from joy, which inspires all the best art. This negation of hope has "close-lipped Patience for its ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... 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
... had made a huge fire, and had heaped up beside it great store of fuel, but, though his body was warm and likely to be warm, his soul inside it felt the ravaging cold outside—remorseless, and full of mock, the ghastly power of negation and unmaking. He had got together all the screens he could find, and with them inclosed the fireplace, so that they sat in a citadel within a fortress. By the fire he had placed for his lordship the antique brocade-covered sofa, that he might lie ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... what I meant to tell you on another subject. If he was displeased, (and it was expressed by a shadow a mere negation of pleasure) it was not with you as a visitor and my friend. You must not fancy such a thing. It was a sort of instinctive indisposition towards seeing you here—unexplained to himself, I have no doubt—of ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... the reasoning of the objectors be just, could not have been intended; I mean that the States, in all cases to which the restriction did not apply, would have a concurrent power of taxation with the Union. The restriction in question amounts to what lawyers call a NEGATIVE PREGNANT that is, a NEGATION of one thing, and an AFFIRMANCE of another; a negation of the authority of the States to impose taxes on imports and exports, and an affirmance of their authority to impose them on all other articles. It would be mere sophistry to argue ...
— The Federalist Papers
... living undoubtedly presents many gaps and 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
... forty was the ideal age for a lover—the terms changed with the seasons, last year "suitor" had been the common phrase—were occasionally swept in young company into a high irrational passion. Mostly, through skillful adult pressure or firm negation, such affairs came to nothing; but even these were sometimes overcome. And, when Linda had been disturbed by the echo of old days in her daughter's tones, she was ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... distinction which you are now treating as arial. But the fact is, you do not yet perceive to what extent this distinction goes; you suppose me to be contending for some minute and subtle shades of difference; so far from that, I mean to affirm that the one law is the direct, formal, and diametrical negation of the other: I assert in the most peremptory manner that he who says, "The value of A is to the value of B as the quantity of labor producing A is to the quantity of labor producing B," does of necessity deny by implication that the relations ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... not of recent date." Permit me to 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
... which it found itself in contact with the spirit of progress, personified in the Grecian civilization and in the Greek race, it was under the absolute necessity of perishing. It could neither launch itself upon a wholly new path, one which was the direct negation of its own genius, nor continue on without change its own existence. Thus, as soon as it began to be penetrated by Greek influence, it fell at once into complete dissolution, and sank into a state of decrepitude, that already resembled death. We shall see, in the next section, how ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... upward in the world. One never sees really clever people in positions of trust, never widely influential or deeply rooted. Look, for instance, at the Royal Academy, at the Judges, at——But there! The very idea of cleverness is an all-round readiness and looseness that is the very negation ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... modern science has greatly confirmed, to wit, the exclusion of capricious gods, to whom the simple belief of ancient ages attributed the government of the universe. Almost a century before him, Lucretius had expressed, in an admirable manner, the unchangeableness of the general system of Nature. The negation of miracle—the idea that everything in the world happens by laws in which the personal intervention of superior beings has no share—was universally admitted in the great schools of all the countries which had accepted Grecian science. Perhaps ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... since justice here exerts itself, it is satisfied. If you reply in the negative, I conclude, that you have then no reason to ascribe justice, in our sense of it, to the gods. If you hold a medium between affirmation and negation, by saying, that the justice of the gods, at present, exerts itself in part, but not in its full extent; I answer, that you have no reason to give it any particular extent, but only so far as you see it, ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... through her politics and her gods; any change in theology and public opinion would be folly and sacrilege. Rome, merciful toward conquered nations, though binding them in chains, spared their lives; slaves are the most fertile source of her wealth; freedom of the nations would be the negation of her rights and the ruin of her finances. Rome, in fact, enveloped in the pleasures and gorged with the spoils of the universe, is kept alive by victory and government; her luxury and her pleasures are the price of her conquests: she can neither ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... The last of these is used with us only in the sense of to go away; in Shakspeare's time (and Shakspeare so uses it) it meant also to part, or part with. A correspondent of Mr. Knight's suggests {114} for the word delight in this passage, also, a new derivation; using de as a negation, and light (lux), delighted, removed from the regions of light. This is impossible; if we look at the context we shall see that it not only contemplated no such thing, but that it is ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 38, Saturday, July 20, 1850 • Various
... his teaching for the seizure of political power by a small class, consisting of about 6 per cent. of the population, and the imposition by force of its rule upon the majority of the population that is either unwilling or passive. That is the negation of Marxian Socialism. It is the essence of Marx's teaching that the social revolution must come as a historical necessity when the proletariat itself comprises an overwhelming majority ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... the tremendous effort of the so-called glorious Reformation, together with its twin sister—the unbelief of the nineteenth century. Whole legions of church reformers, together with armies of philosophers armed with negation, and a thousand and one systems of Paganism, rushed on against the Chair of Peter, and swore that the Papacy would fall, and with it the whole Church. Three hundred years are over, and the Catholic Church is still alive, and, to all appearances, more vigorous than ever. The nations ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... 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 the dormant spirit of nationalism in ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... incriminating document, the scandalous attraction of secret memoirs; and instead, it was as insipid as an obituary. It was as though the artist had been in league with his sitter, had pledged himself to oppose to the lust for post-mortem "revelations" an impassable blank wall of negation. The public was resentful, the critics were aggrieved. Even Mrs. Mellish had to lay ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... an eavesdropping position, the situation was this: Bill Appleby, having carefully closed and locked the cash drawer, was braced with both arms extended against the counter, eyeing Macnooder with a look of steely negation that expressed a settled conviction to doubt instantly any statement whenever or however made. Macnooder's round capuchin body was drawn up in confidence and ease and the smile on his face was bland ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... been much attacked as involving an indefensible 'State absolutism', a denial of 'personality' to lesser groups, even as a negation of the right to lesser loyalties. Mr. Figgis, in a number of suggestive, if unconvincing, writings, has recalled the theories of the Jesuits and other anti-state minorities and protestants on this subject, reinforcing them from the Nonconformist and Trade Union theories ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... 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 ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... 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
... libraries, theatres and Y. M. C. A. halls to which the youth of the hills could descend for recreation. But when winter shut down on Starkfield and the village lay under a sheet of snow perpetually renewed from the pale skies, I began to see what life there—or rather its negation—must have been in ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... one half makes out that some low-lurking instinct, some vague foreboding of what awaited him, on his own side the globe, in the air of so-called civilisation, prompted him to drain to the last drop the whole perfect negation of the acrid. He might have been waiting for the tide of the insipid to begin to flow again, as it seems ever doomed to do when the acrid, the saving acrid, has already ebbed; at any rate his holiday had by the end of the springtime of 1914 done for him all it could, ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... 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 do not correct the evils at all, or else do so at the expense of producing ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... the most complete entree into her society, Stephen had, unquestionably, impressed her the more favorably. For a time he seemed too far removed from her; and she failed to experience that sense of proportion between them so necessary for mutual regard. Perhaps it was due to this negation, or perhaps it was owing to her modest reserve, or perhaps to both, that whatever familiar intercourse, sympathy or affinity ought to have existed was naturally excluded. True friendship requires a certain equality, or at least a feeling of proportion between those whom it would bind together. ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... be if this infinite were by negative privation or privative negation of the end, as it is for a more positive affirmation of the end, ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... for the negative pole of Being—the very negation of Pure Spirit, and opposing it in every way. We shall see the part played by it in the astral ...
— The Human Aura - Astral Colors and Thought Forms • Swami Panchadasi
... line we have already proved to be the productive synthesis of time, with space under the predominance of time. If we exclude space by an abstract assumption, the time remains as a spaceless point, and represents the concentered power of unity and active negation, i.e. retraction, determination, and limit, ab intra. But if we assume the time as excluded, the line vanishes, and we leave space dimensionless, an indistinguishable ALL, and therefore the representative of absolute weakness and formlessness, but, for that very reason, of ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... trickery. She saw his twitching hand, and the misery in his eyes and the cadence of his words came as clearly as notes from a violin in a silent chamber to her ears. She nodded in affirmation; she shook her head in negation; she frowned; she ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... "impersonality" demands special attention, being the most misused and abused term of all. The first and natural signification of the word is the mere negation of personality; as a stone, for instance, is strictly "impersonal." This is the meaning given by the dictionaries. But in this sense, of course, it is inapplicable to human beings. What, then, is the meaning when applied to them? When Mr. Lowell says, "If with us [of the West] the 'I' seems ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... recognition of the nature of death, and the advantages of killing rather than merely overcoming an enemy, the discovery of the use of weapons, introduced warfare into the world. Warfare is, then, not simply the negation of some original principle of mutual aid, nor yet an expression of instinctive aggressiveness or cruelty, but it is a product of original endowment, of conditions of life, and of intelligence all together. It is practical, but at ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... There is nothing in all that. Everything is good in God's eyes.' And this is the perpetual burden of his teaching. 'Satan's empire is the empire of nothing'; there is no such thing as evil—it is a mere 'negation.' And the 'moral virtues,' which attempt to discriminate between right and wrong, are the idlest of delusions; they are merely 'allegories and dissimulations,' they 'do not exist.' Such was one of the most fundamental ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... out 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 ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... vitality or capability of motion actual or imagined; and with respect to these the expression of repose is greater in proportion to the amount and sublimity of the action which is not taking place, as well as to the intensity of the negation of it. Thus we speak not of repose in a stone, because the motion of a stone has nothing in it of energy nor vitality, neither its repose of stability. But having once seen a great rock come down a mountain side, we have a noble sensation of its rest, now bedded ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... rate be the greatest artist. A house or sign painter might instantly enter the lists with Michael Angelo, and might look down on the little, dry, hard manner of Raphael. But grandeur depends on a distinct principle of its own, not on a negation of the parts; and as it does not arise from their omission, so neither is it incompatible with their insertion or the highest finishing. In fact, an artist may give the minute particulars of any object one by one and with the utmost care, and totally neglect the proportions, ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... 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 ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... former is called a Zahiri (outsider), and the latter a Batini, an insider. Moses is quoted because he ignored future rewards and punishments. As regards the "two Eternities," Persian and Arab metaphysicians split Eternity, i.e., the negation of Time, into two halves, Azal (beginninglessness) and Abad (endlessness); both being mere words, gatherings of letters with a subjective significance. In English we use "Eternal" (Aeviternus, age-long, life-long) as loosely, by applying ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... in their operations: for indeed, the affectation which arises from vanity is nearer to truth than the other; as it hath not that violent repugnancy of nature to struggle with, which that of the hypocrite hath. It may be likewise noted, that affectation doth not imply an absolute negation of those qualities which are affected: and therefore, tho', when it proceeds from hypocrisy, it be nearly allied to deceit; yet when it comes from vanity only, it partakes of the nature of ostentation: for instance, the affectation of liberality in a vain ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... conception of the infinite would be more truly described, in our way of speaking, as the indefinite. To us, the notion of infinity is subsequent rather than prior to the finite, expressing not absolute vacancy or negation, but only the removal of limit or restraint, which we suppose to exist not before but after we have already set bounds to thought and matter, and divided them after their kinds. From different points of view, either the finite or infinite may be looked upon respectively both ...
— Philebus • Plato
... 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 came to be day-long; he haunted ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... darkness and silence. Before this, we had found it hard to realize that we were on the bottom of the ocean; now it came upon us suddenly and not without a touch of awe. This absence of sound and light, this unchanging motionlessness and coolness, this absolute negation—that was the bottom of the sea. It lasted only a moment, but in that moment we realized acutely the meaning and joy of sunshine and moving winds, trees, ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... there be anything which is of such a nature as to be and not to be, that will have a place intermediate between pure being and the absolute negation of being? ...
— The Republic • Plato
... was made to discover the north-eastern passage. The enthusiasm of Barendz had died with him, and it may be said that the stern negation by which this supreme attempt to solve the mystery of the pole was met was its best practical result. Certainly all visions of a circumpolar sea blessed with a gentle atmosphere and eternal tranquillity, and offering a smooth and easy passage for the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the aim of Plato in the Sophist. But his view of their connexion falls very far short of the Hegelian identity of Being and Not-being. The Being and Not-being of Plato never merge in each other, though he is aware that 'determination is only negation.' ...
— Parmenides • Plato
... said Waldershare. "It is quite clear that Peel has nothing to offer the country, and the country will not rally round a negation. When he failed in '34 they said there had not been sufficient time for the reaction to work. Well, now, since then, it has had nearly three years, during which you fellows have done everything to outrage every prejudice of the constituency, and yet ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... not count herself or her people to belong to the middle class. How it was it is not quite easy to say—perhaps the tone of implied contempt with which the father spoke of the lower classes, and the quiet negation with which the mother would allude to shopkeepers, may have had to do with it—but the young people all imagined themselves to belong to the upper classes! It was a pity there was no title in the ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... because the death of Parflete opened out other possibilities of action. He was not a man, however, whom one could order to be this, that, or the other; still less could one reproach him for not being this, that, or the other. It was his faith to believe that salvation rests on the negation and renunciation of personality. He pushed this to the complete suppression of his Will, tenderly considered. I need not detain you on the familiar dogmas of Christianity with regard to the reign of nature and the reign of grace. Your view may ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... with these Cabinet meetings was not unimpressive. But the accepted procedure—without a secretary present to keep record of what was done and with apparently no proper minutes kept by anybody—was the very negation of sound administration and of good government. Such practice would have been out of date in the days of the Heptarchy. Furthermore it did not fulfil its purpose in respect to concealment, because whenever the gathering by any accident made up its mind about anything ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... of Negation expressed, once upon a day, a regret that he had not been consulted when the Universe was being planned, otherwise he would have arranged to make good things catching ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... swift negation. "Little Willie don't want to tackle that delicate job. I'm subtle, but not so subtle as that. Alice Heath knows all we know and more, and you can bet they've talked ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... no negation of the extreme heat of the oven of Tufetufetu. I had tested it for myself. No precaution was taken by the walkers. I knew most of them intimately. There was no fraud, no ointment or oil or other application to the feet, and all had not the same thickness of sole. At Raratonga, near Tahiti, ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... for [Hebrew: lv]: "And that Israel might be gathered to Him." Thus it is rendered, among the ancient translators, by Aquila and the Chaldee; while Symmachus, Theodoret, and the Vulgate express the negation. Most of the modern interpreters have followed the Mazoreths. But the assumption of several of these, that [Hebrew: la] is only a different writing for [Hebrew: lv], is altogether without foundation, compare the ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... "impracticable" and "impossible" lose their absoluteness and become only synonyms for the relatively difficult. He has so often found a way out, where humanly speaking there was none, that he no longer looks upon a logical dilemma as a final negation of effort. ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... who through Clericalism strive for political power rather than for the religious welfare of their denomination. In alliance with them are the powerful Jewish financiers who also control the press in Vienna and Budapest. Clearly Austria is the very negation of democracy. It stands for reaction, autocracy, falsehood and hypocrisy, and it is therefore no exaggeration to say that nobody professing democratic views can reasonably plead for the preservation of this system of ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... objected to chemists, speaking of the elective affinities of various elements?—and yet an acid cannot strictly be said to elect the base with which it in preference combines." (p. 93) We have here an affirmation and a negation. It is affirmed that natural selection is the operation of natural laws, analogous to the action of gravitation and of chemical affinities. It is denied that it is a process originally designed, or guided by intelligence, such as the activity which foresees an end and consciously selects and ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... therefore it is England; this is a city, therefore it is London; the apostle mentions government in the primitive Church, therefore they are ruling elders: this were an absurd kind of reasoning. 2. By way of negation. Our reasoning from this text for the ruling elder, is not from the general to a special affirmatively—there are governments in the Church, therefore ruling elders: but this is our arguing—these ...
— The Divine Right of Church Government • Sundry Ministers Of Christ Within The City Of London
... is a hard saying for the Chinese, with their reverence for authority, and Wei Liao Tzu (quoted by Tu Mu) is moved to exclaim: "Weapons are baleful instruments, strife is antagonistic to virtue, a military commander is the negation of civil order!" The unpalatable fact remains, however, that even Imperial wishes must be subordinated to ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu
... Later, even after their wise conclusion that they must be rational, she had been accustomed to put the question, not at all as a purely perfunctory marital civility, but, as she shyly admitted to herself, because it was so sweet to hear Jack's negation and see the love-light in the eyes that soon brought her, fascinated and fluttering, to be folded in his arms a moment. Later still, so confident had she become in her dominion, both knock and query were abandoned, and, unless only five minutes or so had elapsed since ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... sentimentalism is rank irreligion. I view the 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
... Never capable of disguising the sorrow that underlies all human happiness—or, as I think of it in looking at his work, the sense of transience—Botticelli, as age came upon him, was more than ever depressed. One has the feeling that he was persuaded that only through devotion and self-negation could peace of mind be gained, and yet for himself could find none. The sceptic was too strong in him. Savonarola's eloquence could not make him serene, however much he may have come beneath its spell. It but served to increase his melancholy. Hence these wistful despondent ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... heard. They are in a complete negation. It is this which causes the difference of terms and expressions employed by writers on this subject, who find a difficulty in making themselves understood, except by those whose experience accords with their own. Another effect of this negation is, that the soul having lost all that was its own, God having substituted Himself, it can attribute nothing either to itself or to God; because it knows God only, of whom it can say nothing. Here all is ...
— Spiritual Torrents • Jeanne Marie Bouvires de la Mot Guyon
... Dr. McPherson completed the triple chord of negation. A chord so explosive, so crassly out of keeping with the simple question that evoked it that Grimm stared amazed from one ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... the world than their own priceless person, and it is this that they wish to make its mark. They bring this quickly about by beginning a paradox; the sterility of their own heads suggests their taking the path of negation; and truths that have long been recognised are now denied—for instance, the vital power, the sympathetic nervous system, generatio equivoca, Bichat's distinction between the working of the passions and the working of intelligence, or they return to crass atomism, etc., etc. Hence ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... 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 of all principle.'* ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... schooner from Port Egmont, before the armament arrived, should be ordered to attend the house; and when this was negatived, he moved an address to his majesty, praying that the house might be acquainted at what time reparation was first demanded from Spain, which likewise received a negation. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... expose such cold negation of the instincts is easy: to express or even half express the instincts is very hard. The instincts are very much concerned with what literary people call "style" in letters or more vulgar people call "style" in dress. They ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... often do we hear that said, and how seldom is it a reality! Natalia Savishna had no reason to fear 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 ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... the new attitude might be to our critics, to Christians the reform was positive. What was discarded was a limitation, a negation. The movement was essentially conservative, even actually reconstructive. For the language disused was a language inconsistent with the definitions of orthodoxy; it set bounds to the infinite, and by implication withdrew from the creative rule all such processes as could be brought within the descriptions ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... for example, the expression 'poetic contents' by others—in opposition to works which only offer an harmonic and rhythmic play of tones. Writers on aesthetics of our day declaim against the latter term; with good reason, if it refer to programme-music; without reason, if they extend their negation to all Beethoven's music, and deny its poetic contents. Whence that tendency, which so frequently manifests itself, and that strong desire to give pictorial explanations, especially of the Beethoven symphonies and sonatas, if they contained nothing ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... own conquest, an illusion born of vanity and also of the craving for liberty. We are unwilling to be the product of circumstances, or the mere expansion of an inner germ. And yet we have received everything, and the part which is really ours, is small indeed, for it is mostly made up of negation, resistance, faults. We receive everything, both life and happiness; but the manner in which we receive, this is what is still ours. Let us then, receive trustfully without shame or anxiety. Let us humbly accept from God even ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... like; but that they are taken from multitude in a transcendent sense. Now multitude so understood has relation to the many of which it is predicated, as "one" convertible with "being" is related to being; which kind of oneness does not add anything to being, except a negation of division, as we saw when treating of the divine unity (Q. 11, A. 1); for "one" signifies undivided being. So, of whatever we say "one," we imply its undivided reality: thus, for instance, "one" applied to man signifies the undivided nature ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... mere horror of blank Naught-at-all, Whose circumambience doth these ghosts enthral. A lurid thought is growthless, dull Privation, Yet that is but a Purgatory curse; Hell knows a fear far worse, A fear—a future state;—'tis positive Negation! ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... warned me against Maurice de Gu['e]rin on the ground of his pantheism. I had been warned against the poems of Emerson on account of their paganism; but as I had been brought up on Virgil, I looked on pantheism and paganism as rather orthodox compared to Renan's negation and the horrors of Calvinism. And, after all, the Catholic Church had retained so much that was Jewish and pagan that I was sure to find myself almost as much at home among the pagans as I was in ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... body about; to rock to and fro on the knees, vociferating prayers, are methods which enable the members of the respective sects in which they are practiced either to enter, as they say, into the Eternal Being, or to become informed with it through the negation of the self. The sense of personality, at any rate, is more or less completely lost, and the ecstasy takes a form more or less passionate, according as the worshiper depends on the rapidity rather ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... to Edwin, in a tone good-naturedly informing, and when he had done Edwin could see that the shape of the hall depended on the shape of the house, and that halls had only been crushed and pulled into something long and narrow because the disposition of houses absolutely demanded this ugly negation of the very idea of a hall. Again, he had to begin to think afresh, to see afresh. He conceived a real admiration for Osmond Orgreave; not more for his original and yet common-sense manner of regarding things, than for his aristocratic deportment, ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... 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 ...
— The Insurrection in Paris • An Englishman: Davy
... 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 ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... all the generals down to the last Southern bush-whacker, incarnate the violent and hideous passion of slavery, now all-powerful throughout the South. Here, Lincoln, Seward, McClellan, Blair, Halleck, etc., incarnate the negation of the purest and noblest aspirations of the North. Stanton alone is inspired by a national patriotic idea. No unity, no harmony between the people and the leaders; ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... fable of imprisonment in one's own Palace has become a sad fact, then? Majesty complains to Assembly; Municipality deliberates, proposes to petition or address; Sections respond with sullen brevity of negation. Lafayette flings down his Commission; appears in civic pepper-and-salt frock; and cannot be flattered back again;—not in less than three days; and by unheard-of entreaty; National Guards kneeling to him, and declaring that it is not sycophancy, that they are free men kneeling here to the Statue ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... concrete, that often, when I have supposed a word had been dissected and traced to its root, subsequent attention has proved it to be a compound. Thus verbs have been inserted with pronouns, or with particles, indicating negation, or the past or future tense, when it has been supposed they had been divested of these appendages. I am now going over the work the third time. The simplest forms of the verb seem to be the first and third persons singular ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... less certain; for I should not have the idea of a limit if I did not conceive of infinity, and the word imperfect would have no meaning for me, if I could not imagine perfection, of which imperfection is but the negation. Starting from this point, the philosopher proves by a series of reasonings that the conception of perfection by our minds demonstrates the real existence of that perfection: God is. He adds, that the existence ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... weighing this suggestion. They both broke into negation at once as they reached their ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... Passing from the whirling ball the ions darted through the cylinder to two bands of a peculiar metal affixed to the base of the vehicles somewhat like skids of a sled. Impinging upon these they produced a partial negation of gravity, lifting the shell slightly, and at the same time creating a powerful repulsive force or thrust that could be directed backward, forward, or sidewise at the will of the driver. The creation of this energy and ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... a positive disproof of their possibility. A simple substance would have to occupy a simple portion of space; but space has no simple parts. The supposition of such a part is the supposition, not of space, but of the negation of space. A simple substance, in existing and occupying any portion of space, must contain a real multiplicity of parts external to each other, i.e., it must contradict its own nature, ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... adjectives, and all the following ones as substantives. For this reason, the governed word must stand in the genitive instead of the accusative: osm sot (nom. sto), eight hundred. In all negative phrases they employ likewise the genitive instead of the accusative. A double negation occurs in Slavic frequently, without indicating an affirmation; for even if another negation has already taken place, they are accustomed to prefix to the verb the negative particle ne ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... pleased to give an Answer, but instead of answering, did there dispute the Authority of this high Court. My humble motion to this high Court in behalf of the kingdom of England is, That the prisoner may be directed to make a positive Answer, either by way of confession, or negation; which if he shall refuse to do, that the matter of the Charge may be taken pro confesso, and the Court may proceed ...
— State Trials, Political and Social - Volume 1 (of 2) • Various
... is the negation of caprice, of arbitrary sovereignty, of mystery. We know the principles of His government. His majestic 'I wills' cover the whole ground of human life and needs for the present and the future. We can go into no region of life but we find that God has defined His ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... introducing changes haughtily schemed on the heights of official self-complacency—changes which were not justified by any intimate acquaintance with the country, nor by a living faith in any ideal, not even in one of negation, and in illustration of this he adduced his own education. He demanded before every thing else that the true spirit of the nation should be recognized, and that it should be looked up to with that humility without which no courage is possible, not even that wherewith to oppose falsehood. Finally ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... force) is by no means a matter, as some suppose, of impulse or intuition. In general, to be found, it must be elaborately sought and, although a positive merit of the highest class, demands in its attainment less of invention than negation. ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... answered by another wave of the black negation—stronger, rolling up to smash them down, as a wave in the heavy surf of a wild ocean pounds its force against the beach. This time Dane thought he could see that dark mass. He tore his eyes away before it took on substance, concentrating on the movements ...
— Voodoo Planet • Andrew North
... 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 in my power. If you think this old woman guilty, ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... as non-existent. If we might pursue the subject further, I could point out, that the power which is commonly attributed to God is not only human (as showing that God is conceived by the multitude as a man, or in the likeness of a man), but involves a negation of power. However, I am unwilling to go over the same ground so often. I would only beg the reader again and again, to turn over frequently in his mind what I have said in Part i. from Prop. xvi. ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... double yoke of a mother-in-law and a rigid ceremonial. Then comes his introduction to Hebrew literature. His conscience long refuses assent, but stern logic triumphs, and the result is that all the ideas that have been his guiding principles crumble into dust one by one. Negation replaces faith. The terrible conflict begins with a whole town of formalists, who declare him outside of the community of Israel,—a pitiless conflict, in which he is supported half-heartedly by two or three of the ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... thought in old frames in spite of a touch, of this influence. Rodin, the emancipator of modern sculpture, and a notorious anarchist as regards architecture, is not always applicable. The imitation of his style induces a negation of modeling only in evidence in one of ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... to be aware of, or which needs to be dwelt upon with reference to the particular occasion, will be selected as the cause, even a negative condition (e.g. the sentinel's absence from his post, as the cause of a surprise), though from a mere negation no consequence can really proceed. On the other hand, the object which is popularly regarded as standing in the relation of patient, and as being the mere theatre of the effect, is never styled cause, being included in the phrase describing ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... prudent, and so pentrating that nothing remains hidden from her. Syn, the tenth, keeps the door in the hall, and shuts it against those who ought not to enter. She presides at trials when any thing is to be denied on oath, whence the proverb, 'Syn (negation) is set against it,' when ought is denied. Hlina, the eleventh, has the care of those whom Frigga intends to deliver from peril. Snotra, the twelfth, is wise and courteous, and men and women who possess these qualities ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... harmful because it is absolutely false; it is simply the negation of eloquence. Consider what the legislative hall, the lecture room and the court would be like if nothing but set pieces were delivered. We are familiar with the fact that many an orator and lawyer, who is brilliant when ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... ministry. Lord Northcliffe, who is the Hearst of England, has become its boss. Inasmuch as you object to our new motto, "Trust the President," I offer as a substitute, "Trust Lord Northcliffe, Bonar Law, and the Philosopher of Negation." The dear bishops won't give up their toddy, so England must go without ammunition. Germany is standing off Belgium, England and France, with her right hand; Russia with her left, and is about to step on Italy. Germany has not yet answered our protest ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... "Wasn't it a shame sending me to bed to-day? And I hadn't really done nothing!" The intensity of the speech called for the double negation. ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... the grains of a wisdom more precious than gold, or even its priceless pearl. That "free and roving thing," the human soul—what might it not have found out for itself, in a world so wide? To deny, at all events, would be only "to limit the mind, by negation." ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... the yard-stick in his hand speak to him and say: "'Tis a false measure that governs." He who weighs out a commodity does not hear his scales raise their voice and say: "'Tis a false weight that reigns." A strange order of things surely, that has for its base supreme disorder, the negation of all law! equilibrium ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... that is, my dear Miss O'Carroll, is not applicable in this case—if you will permit me to take the liberty of saying so. Think is not synonymous with believe—for belief, in many most important particulars, results from the total absence, the absolute negation of thought, and is thereby the sane and orthodox condition of mind; and thought and belief are both essentially different from fancy, and fancy, again, is distinct from imagination. This distinction ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... the contrary, their boast that they have felt His presence, His unity, and His personality in a manner more pointed than have the rest of mankind; and those of us who pretend to find in the Desert a mere negation, are checked by the thought that within the Desert the most positive of religions have appeared. Indeed, to deny God has been the sad privilege of very few in any society of men; and those few, if it be examined, have invariably been men in whom the power to experience was deadened, usually by ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... war as the negation of all that is good," said Mr. Whitehouse tonight, "I desired to see what its ravages were in a country exposed to all its fury, and what steps were possible to mitigate them. I do not think that any one here has realized the plight of ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... doctrine at all—which they don't, thank heaven!—it is not that. But Schopenhauerism might easily have ruined Tristan—did not ruin it only because Wagner himself, when writing it, was consumed with a fervour of passion that is the negation of Schopenhauerism. It is responsible, however, for many of the longueurs of the Ring, as, for instance, in Act II of the Valkyrie, when Wotan stops the action to give Bruennhilde an elementary lesson in Schopenhauer-cum-Wagner metaphysics. The funny thing is that Wagner never renounced ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... impatiently waving 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
... the thing was overwhelming. It was not mere pressure; it had a character of its own for which the girl afterwards had no words. She could only say that, so far from being negation, or emptiness, or non-being, it had an air, hot as flame, black as ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... Nature never a negation, but ever an affirmation. Commonly, indeed, the shape of a body seems a confinement; but could we behold the creative energy it would reveal itself as the measure that this energy imposes upon itself, and in which it shows itself a truly intelligent force; for in everything is the power ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... stronger case than this of the degraded position of the father. And what I want to make clear is that in such negation of all father-right rested the inherent weakness in the matriarchal conditions—a weakness which led eventually to the re-establishment of the paternal family. We must be very clear in our minds as to the sharp distinction between the restricted family and the communal clan. ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... for the inherent might of the Gospel that, in spite of the object-lessons continually provided for the natives by white men of the negation of all good, that it has stricken its roots so deeply into the soil of the Pacific islands. Just as the best proof of the reality of the Gospel here in England is that it survives the incessant assaults upon it from within by its professors, by ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... 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, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... had nothing to fight for but a compromise, Prussia had nothing to fight for but a negation. She was and is, in the supreme sense, the spirit that denies. It is as certain that she was fighting against liberty in Napoleon as it is that she was fighting against religion in Maria Theresa. What she was fighting for she would have ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... na-k[)u]m-i-en a-na-pi-a[n]? When I am out of hearing, where am I? [The lines extending from the ears denote hearing; the arms directed toward the right and left, being the gesture of negation, usually made by throwing the hands outward and away from the front ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... those Indians who 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 ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... pretence we have cited,—the one reconciling the conscience with the cowardice of the North, and the other conceding the arrogant pretensions of the South,—the negation of the power of the central government over Slavery was carried into effect. By a legislative hocus-pocus, known as the Compromise Measures of 1850, Congress, contrary to the uniform tendency of bodies ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... strength as a real advantage, which such a man is not master of. We know darkness, which is nothing real, only by denying, and consequently by conceiving daylight, which is most real, and most positive. In like manner we know the finite only by assigning it a bound, which is a mere negation of a greater extent; and consequently only the privation of the infinite. Now a man could never represent to himself the privation of the infinite, unless he conceived the infinite itself: just as he could not have a notion of sickness, unless he had ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... to you that the evidence at our command as completely and fully negatives that hypothesis as it did the preceding one. And I confess that I had too much respect for your intelligence to think it necessary to add that the negation was equally clear and equally valid, whatever the source from which that hypothesis might be derived, or whatever the authority by which it might be supported. I further stated that, according to the third hypothesis, or that of evolution, the existing state of things is the last ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... creative impulse had nothing to take its place. That giant spot in high air was a plague of evil influence. It seemed like a new misanthropic belief which had fallen on human beings, carrying with it the negation ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... Western-born, but the chilling discouragement he could crowd into the two-letter negation spoke eloquently ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... of his history. Man has had historically—and man needs for his fulfilment—the family, the home and the possession of property. The notion of property has, for the modern age, been defiled by the corruptions of Capitalism; but modern Capitalism is really a negation of property because it is a denial of its limitations. He summarises this idea with one of his most brilliant illustrations: "It is the negation of property that the Duke of Sutherland should have all the farms in one estate; just as it would be the negation of marriage if he had all our wives ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... say deep, grave things in, doesn't it, this late afternoon hour? I've wanted to say it since the other night when, through poor Jack's folly of revenge and blindness, we were all put into such an ugly muddle, at such ugly cross-purposes." She paused here and Valerie, giving neither assent nor negation, said: ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... manner unworthy of any serious answer. Under pretext of painting a picture of economic doctrine, we are given its caricature. Such has never been the system, to the elaboration of which the purest hearts and noblest intellects have devoted themselves. A negation does not constitute the ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... 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 ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... negation of his personality the slave thought and acted solely in terms of the social mind of the white. Hence the prevailing idea of the slave, "massa can do no wrong."[345] The slave had no social consciousness, no ethical code apart from that of the white master; his ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... you can say anything. In me you will always find one who has no interest above your interests." He stopped and took her hands, but she shook her head in gentle negation, and, as he obeyed the unuttered mandate and let his own arms fall at his sides, she rewarded him with a smile that thrilled him like ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... had to be found to eliminate the possibility of infection by original minds, or clearly the Holy State could not consider itself safe. Here, indeed, we see the hardest of the problems statesmen of the past had to solve. From the mere negation of the Censorship, a positive advance had to be made to the obliteration of original thought. This at first, necessarily, was but tentative, and only the confidence gained through successful experiment enabled governments at last to find where ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... soft, so submissive and yielding? Why is there so much negation and abnegation in your hearts? Why is there so little fate in ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... perfection with which the world, as it appears to the religious man, is endowed. He feels himself, in the first place, to be part of a world scheme in which ultimate perfection is secured. It has already been pointed out that any individual human life is characterized by negation, conflict, and disappointment. Our lives seem largely to be at the mercy of circumstance. Our inheritance is fixed for us without our connivance in the matter; accident determines in which social environment we happen to be born. And ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... the sun should have the skies For such a flaming way to advertise; He may have been a painter sick at heart With Nature's toiling for a new surprise; He may have been a cynic, who now, for all Of anything divine that his effete Negation may have tasted, Saw truth in his own image, rather small, Forbore to fever the ephemeral, Found any barren height a good retreat From any swarming street, And in the sun saw power superbly wasted; And when ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... his, head in negation, saying, "When one at my age makes a desperate resolution, it's because there is no other recourse. A man who, like myself, has spent his youth and his mature years toiling for the future of himself and his sons; a man ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... this revival of reverence for St. John Nepomuk. Owing to centuries of oppression the mind of the people of Bohemia has developed a strong "spirit of negation," "der Geist der stets verneint," as Goethe would say, to the detriment of constructive ability, so it may be that this spirit having failed to reconstruct a church of some sort, at least on national lines, is going under before the ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... men are sinful. But prohibitions pre-suppose as their foundation positive commands. We are forbidden to do something because we are inclined to do it, and because we ought to do the opposite. Every 'thou shalt not' implies a deeper 'thou shalt.' The cold negation really rests on ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... been but one firm foothold for the Lodge in the world of men;—I think none of these things could have come about; and that for the same reason that you cannot have total darkness in a room in which a lamp is lighted. But this darkness was total: intolerance is the negation of spiritual light. Of all the various movements in the Roman world that had not actual members of the Lodge behind and moving them, Christianity had the greatest impetus; and it was the one that first ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... literary genres changes in an almost regular order of sequence—the Swiss Bovet has even tried recently to lay down a regular law of alternation. Especially is the theatre from time to time abused for being a destructive negation of art, in just as lively a fashion as it is declared at other times to be the sole realization of the artistic ideal. As to prevailing temperaments, a preferably pathetic tone—as, for example, in the epoch of Freytag, Geibel, Treitschke—alternates with a sceptically ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... hand of God is ever visible in all mundane affairs, and the frightful parting between the spiritual and material worlds, first originated by the Baconian philosophy, which culminates in our days in the almost open negation of the spiritual, and thus materializes all things, is with justice viewed by the children of St. Patrick with a holy horror as leading to atheism, if it ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... Chancellor with no colleagues, and by making that official responsible solely to the Emperor. Such a scheme would have meant, obviously, a thoroughgoing centralization in all Imperial affairs and the utter negation of anything in the way of a parliamentary system of government. The more liberal members of the constituent Reichstag compelled (p. 214) a modification of the original Bismarckian programme; so that when the constitution assumed ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... them as mainly composed of the very meanest slaves out of the gross and abject multitude; their proselytism they considered as the clandestine initiation into some strange and revolting mystery, which involved as its direct teachings contempt of the gods, and the negation of all patriotism and all family affection; they firmly believed that they worshipped the head of an ass; they thought it natural that none but the vilest slaves and the silliest woman should adopt so misanthropic ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... to Indian doctrines, entirely external to the true God of India, or Brahma in the neuter gender. Brahma is alone, unchangeable in the midst of creation: all emanates from him, he comprehends all, but he remains extraneous to all: he is Being and the negation of beings. Brahma is never worshipped; the indeterminate Being is never invoked; he is inaccessible to the prayers as the actions of man; humanity, as well as nature, is extraneous to him. External to Brahma rises the Trimurti, that is to say, Brahma ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... extended the intellectual horizon and intensified the enthusiasm for beauty. Men's interest in life was no longer narrowly religious, but human; their art became the expression of the new spirit. Early Christianity had been ascetic, enjoining negation of life and the mortification of the flesh. The men of the Renaissance, with something of the feeling of the elder Greeks, glorified the body and delighted in the pride of life. Pagan myths and Greek legends take their place ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... assimilated English and German ideas; but hearts too light to struggle and to suffer withered like crushed flowers. Thus the principle of death descended slowly and without shock from the head to the bowels. Instead of having the enthusiasm of evil we had only the negation of the good; instead of despair, insensibility. Children of fifteen seated listlessly under flowering shrubs, conversed for pastime on subjects which would have made shudder with terror the motionless groves ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... been previously informed?" he said to the Egyptian; and receiving some sign of negation from her, he closed the book, and leading me apart into a corner of the apartment, discovered the matter in a very pious and ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... town, we cannot wait to remove it till we have a new system of drains, and it may fairly be said that religion as practised in contemporary France was a poisonous sewer. But the true answer is that knowledge, and therefore civilization, are advanced by criticism and negation, as well as by construction and positive discovery. When a man has the talent to attack with effect falsehood, prejudice, and imposture, it is his duty, if there are any social ...
— A History of Freedom of Thought • John Bagnell Bury
... himself a bubble of gas instead of the son of a god, he would not have changed the face of the world. Negation cannot be the parent of heroism, though it will produce an indifference that counterfeits it not ill, since Petronius died quite as serenely as ever did the martyrs of ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... require less of you.... So much less that father will scarcely expect me to play any more accompaniments to your 'necklaces of precious tones'—so much less that the minimum of my interest in you vanishes to absolute negation.... So I shall not ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... uproars more augment the brawl—nor the waves of the blown Baltic with their clubbed sounds —than their opposite (Silence her sacred self) is multiplied and rendered more intense by numbers, and by sympathy. She too hath her deeps, that call unto deeps. Negation itself hath a positive more and less; and closed eyes would seem to obscure the ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... which we are not sensible. Few are capable of distinguishing betwixt the liberty of spontaniety, as it is called in the schools, and the liberty of indifference; betwixt that which is opposed to violence, and that which means a negation of necessity and causes. The first is even the most common sense of the word; and as it is only that species of liberty, which it concerns us to preserve, our thoughts have been principally turned towards it, and have almost universally ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... personal opinion on religion, morals, and government, in direct opposition to the immutable laws of the Universe, and the attitude he assumes towards the mysterious Cause and Original Source of Life is nearly always one of three things; contradiction, negation, or defiance. From the first to the last he torments himself with inventions to outwit or subdue Nature, and in the end dies, utterly defeated. His civilizations, his dynasties, his laws, his manners, his customs, are all doomed to destruction and oblivion as completely ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... mastered his hand, and looked up in his face with a whole soul of negation in her wistful eyes. 'No, no, no—just as you ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... disturbed. Thus it is that to-day some States, which have less population than some of the wards in the city of New York, have as many votes in the Senate as the great State of New York. It is unquestionably a palpable negation of majority rule, for as no measure can become a law without the concurrence of the Senate—now numbering ninety-six Senators—a combination of the little States, whoso aggregate population is not a fifth of the American people, can defeat the will of ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... They are worthy of such an origin. They recommend that blind and slavish submission to ecclesiastical dictation which the so-called successors of Peter have ever since inculcated. "It need hardly be remarked," says Dr. Lightfoot, "how subversive of the true spirit of Christianity, in the negation of individual freedom and the consequent suppression of direct responsibility to God in Christ, is the crushing despotism with which" the language of these letters, "if taken literally, would invest the episcopal office." [77:2] And yet, having devoted nearly thirty years off and on to the study ...
— The Ignatian Epistles Entirely Spurious • W. D. (William Dool) Killen |
