"Truism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that. I don't quite understand that. But it has nothing to do with my present purpose. When I said that we were neither of us so young as we once were, I uttered what was a stupid platitude,—a foolish truism.' ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... you are working and attending regularly to office business. Look to that and to your health at present. Depend upon it, there is nothing like work. Fix your teeth in it. Work is medicine. A truism! Truisms, whether they lie in the depths of thought, or on the surface, are at any rate the pearls ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of suffering is contained in the experience; and do you know, Israfil, I think it dangerous to leave an energetic woman without a single strong interest or object in life. Trouble is sure to come of it sooner or later—which sounds like a truism now that I have said it, and truisms are things which we habitually neglect to act upon. In my case nothing of this kind would have happened "—and again her glance round the room expressed a comprehensive view of her present situation—"if I had been allowed to support a charity hospital ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... only answer with a hackneyed truism," Dick said. "There can be no love that is not free. Always, please, remember the point of view is that of the higher types. And the point of view answers you, Dar. The vast majority of individuals must be held ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... captain, with that solemn deliberation which he was wont to assume when about to deliver a palpable truism. "W'en you've come to live as long as me you'll find that everything turns out different from what people have bin led to ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... "nutritional relation" brought about by a "balancing of forces" is merely to give a new denomination to the unexplained fact. The changes are, of course, brought about by a "nutritional" process, and the symmetry is undoubtedly the result of a "balance of forces," but to say so is a truism. The question is, what is the cause of this "nutritional balancing"? It is here contended that it must be due to an internal cause which at present science is utterly incompetent to explain. It is ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... violated when a man does what he is physically necessitated to do, and that no law can compel him to do more than he can do. Thus a disabled soldier cannot be compelled to march on with his regiment; necessity compels him to remain behind. In this sense the principle quoted is a truism; hence its universal acceptance. Applying the same principle in a wider sense, moralists agree that human law-givers do not, and in ordinary circumstances cannot, impose obligations the fulfilment of which requires extraordinary virtue. Even God Himself does not usually exact ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... deliberate tension of the intellect, and that it is through this kind of intuitive investigation that the 'spirit of scepticism' primarily arises, is equally true; though not, perhaps, at the first blush, so apparent. In this sense, the statement of Mr. Buckle is simply one half of a truism, the other half of which, not enunciated ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... general principle to knowledge has been a benefactor to the world. But there is a danger that, in his first enthusiasm, he may not recognize the proportions or limitations to which his truth is subjected; he does not see how far he has given birth to a truism, or how that which is a truth to him is a truism to the rest of the world; or may degenerate in the next generation. He believes that to be the whole which is only a part,—to be the necessary foundation which is really only a valuable aspect of the truth. The systems of all philosophers require ...
— Philebus • Plato
... and a study of the workings of the human mind supports one proposition which many of the great captains of war have accepted as a truism. "There are no bad troops: there are only bad leaders." Taking on percentage what we already know of our average American raw material, as it had proved itself in every war, and as it has been studied in such a laboratory as the camp at Cape Sabine, no exception can be taken to that statement. ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... of the sight, the hearing, the appetite, false teeth, false hair, respiration, massage, and so on, there can be no salvation. That people who do not make use of these perfected preparations are stronger and healthier, has become such a truism, that advertisements are printed in the newspapers of stomach-powders for the wealthy, under the heading, "Blessings for the poor," {252} in which it is stated that only the poor are possessed of proper digestive powers, and that the rich require assistance, and, among other ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... us that 'Injustice pays itself with frightful compound interest,' but there are reasons for suspecting that Mr. Carlyle's definition of the just and the unjust are such as to reduce this and all his other sentences of like purport to the level of mere truism and repetition. If you secretly or openly hold that to be just and veracious which is successful, then it needs no further demonstration that penalties of ultimate failure are exacted for injustice, because it is precisely the failure that ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... work, but it is there. The inference is an illogical one, but under the conditions inevitable. And being an inference religion is not primarily an emotion but a conviction, and it must stand or fall by its intellectual trustworthiness. It seems, indeed, little less than a truism to say that unless men first of all believed something about religion they could never have emotions concerning it. Hope and fear may colour our convictions, they may prevent the formation of correct opinions, but they originate in connection with a belief in every case. And ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... under the personal care and instruction and guidance of its distinguished Founder and Principal, Dr. Booker T. Washington, and that I have striven, from the first day until now, to put into practise the lessons taught me by him and his excellent body of teachers. At Tuskegee we were taught the truism, "If you can not find a way, make one." I hope I am not immodest in saying that I think I have, in ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... and Communication. So obvious, indeed, is the necessity of teaching and learning for the continued existence of a society that we may seem to be dwelling unduly on a truism. But justification is found in the fact that such emphasis is a means of getting us away from an unduly scholastic and formal notion of education. Schools are, indeed, one important method of the ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... call Happiness the Chief Good is a mere truism, and what is wanted is some clearer account of its real nature. Now this object may be easily attained, when we have discovered what is the work of man; for as in the case of flute-player, statuary, or artisan of any kind, or, ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... copy-book maxim which had been just too accurately copied. It was a platitude which they had always held in theory unexpectedly put into practice. The tyrants did not hate democracy because it was a paradox; they hated it because it was a truism which seemed in some danger of ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... himself, the keystone and the occasion of this universal edifice. "Nothing, not God," he says, "is greater to one than oneself is;" a statement with an irreligious smack at the first sight; but like most startling sayings, a manifest truism on a second. He will give effect to his own character without apology; he sees "that the elementary laws never apologise." "I reckon," he adds, with quaint colloquial arrogance, "I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by, after all." The level ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and over every association of men, even the largest, the widest, the mightiest. And now the Infidel, having taken away our hope of help from heaven, comes with the serpent's hiss, and fiendish sneer, to taunt the perishing world with this miserable truism—that the tendency of everything on earth is to perdition, and that it needs no inspiration to tell it. Truly it does not. Were that all the prophets of God had to tell us—as it is all the prophets of Infidelity can prophecy—we had as little need for ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... those who value themselves on their powers of reflection, or, on the other, to those who lay claim to what, in modern phrenological jargon, is called the Organ of Locality, when we venture to surmise that the two are rarely found in combination; nay, that it seems to us a very evident truism, that in proportion to the general activity of the intellect upon subjects of pith and weight, the mind will be indifferent to those minute external objects by which a less contemplative understanding will note, and map out, and impress upon the memory, the chart of the road its owner has ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Judaism, until the period of modern reform, this fact of human life was not merely an unconscious truism, it was consciously admitted. And it ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... concept? No matter in what abundant measure such a performer may possess the good qualities of earnestness, conviction and sincerity, he is not an artist. "Poeta nascitur, non fit," has long been accepted as a truism; and similarly, it is supposed that the artist also is born, not made. But seeing that the mechanical side of any art is learned by experience, study, or observation—still to quote the definition—without which an adequate manifestation of that art is impossible, then certainly ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... wheat. When we discussed the subject and foretold the straits to which the country would be reduced in the event of war with a great European Power, he concluded these forebodings with the habitual remark, "Well, what I says is, them as lives longest will see the most." A truism, no doubt, but, as time has proved, by no ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... Americans being essentially gregarious, and business teaching the truism that a cent saved is a cent gained, hackney coaches are comparatively little used by the men; for it must be remembered that idlers in this country are an invisible minority of the community! The natural consequence is, ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... is the fate of sequels," as Stevenson said in his dedication of Catriona, "to disappoint those who have waited for them." Besides, life is essentially continuous.—It may not be inept to state a truism of this kind in a world of novels where the climax of life, if not indeed its very conclusion, is held to be reached on the day of marriage! There is often, of course, more than one true passion of love in a man's life; and even ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... endeavor to make it so to you, Lady Mabel," said Major Warren, who, impatient of his superior's monopoly, here tried to edge in a word. But the colonel cut him short with "That's a mere truism, Warren, a self-evident proposition. Let us have nothing more of that sort. One of the peculiarities of this climate, Lady Mabel, is that it has a double spring: one in February and another in April. Then we will see you take your appropriate place in the picture, representing ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... see, Leonard, that though knowledge be power, it is only one of the powers of the world; that there are others as strong, and often much stronger; and the assertion either means but a barren truism, not worth so frequent a repetition, or it means something that you would find it very ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... arrangement was sound to the core, and he hazarded the opprobrium of our stern conventional system. To him, Lady Hamilton had an enduring charm which influenced his wild, weak, generous soul, and was in fact an inspiration to him. It is a truism that the life-story of all men has its tragedy and romance, and in this, Nelson's was only similar to others; and who can ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... and another; and it is by the aggregation of such men that a nation becomes prosperous. It must never therefore be forgotten, that it is not the possession of knowledge, but the use which we make of it, that confers distinction. For no truism is more incontrovertible than this, that knowledge which we cannot or do ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... moon, Where all sighs are deposited; and now It happened luckily, the chaste orb shone As clear as such a climate will allow; And Juan's mind was in the proper tone To hail her with the apostrophe—"O thou!" Of amatory egotism the Tuism,[777] Which further to explain would be a truism. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... the less passion and fancy accordingly can eloquence infuse into the discussion of them. Mathematics have produced no quarrels among mankind—it is by the mysterious and the vague, that temper as well as imagination is most roused. In proof of this while the acknowledged clearness almost to truism, which the leading principles of Political Science have attained, has tended to simplify and tame down the activities of eloquence on that subject. There is still another arena left, in the science of the Law, where ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... decidedly. "I am sure of it. I am a firm believer in the truism that 'murder will out.' Sooner or ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... The emphatic declaration of Christ, "My Father is greater than I," especially arrested my attention. Could I really expound this as meaning, "My Father, the Supreme God, in greater than I am, if you look solely to my human nature?" Such a truism can scarcely have deserved such emphasis. Did the disciples need to be taught that God was greater than man? Surely, on the contrary, the Saviour must have meant to say: "Divine as I am, yet my heavenly Father is greater than I, even ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... water!" then with a look of exulting contempt at the remaining fluid, he added, "Soul gone water? No!" This idea, that the soul was not drowned, electrified me; so good is a word spoken in due season, however trite a truism that word ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... Hindustani means both the fleshy member of the body, called the tongue, and also language or speech, just like our word "tongue," which has both significations. In the former sense it applies alike to man and beast; in the latter it is mere truism to say that it applies to man only. Jibh, in Hindi and Hindustani, means the tongue only in the sense of the member of the body, never in the sense of speech; hence it is equally applicable to man or brute. Ask any physician ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli
... brevis" has been so often said, that from a proverb it has become a truism; but it must continue to be the refrain of those who write upon art. The subject is so long, and its ramifications are so intricate, that it is difficult to include them all ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... circulation of the blood; it is the business of lesser men to apply the discovery to practical ends. It takes a Whitney to invent the cotton gin, but the dullest negro roustabout can operate it. Why multiply illustrations of a truism? Theory, you perceive, calls for other and higher gifts than application. The man who can formulate the eternal laws of social evolution can safely leave it to others to put his laws ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... for the attainment of academic honors, and the relaxation of discipline, had by this time created a widespread and deeply felt contempt for the whole system of which they formed a part; and the indulgent but candid observer, who tries to dilute his censure with the truism that he could not have been placed anywhere in this sublunary world without discovering many evils, informs us that in his seven years' residence at the university he saw immorality, habitual drunkenness, idleness, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... create, if he can, some feeling of dissatisfaction with the world within which the practical man has always lived and acted; to suggest something of its fragmentary and subjective character. We turn back therefore to a further examination of the truism—so obvious to those who are philosophers, so exasperating to those who are not—that man dwells, under normal conditions, in a world of imagination rather than a world of facts; that the universe in which he lives and at which he looks is but a construction which the mind has ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... "We must define the words truth and untruth," he said; "but, subject to that definition, I have no hesitation in enunciating the truism, that a Church is not from heaven which ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... pleasures; and this knowledge would first lend to his general love of pleasure any point of application in the governance of life or in benevolent legislation. Some concrete image of a happy human world would take the place of the futile truism that pleasure is good and pain evil. This is, of course, what utilitarian moralists meant to do, and actually did, in so far as their human sympathies extended, which was not to the highest things; ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... we enter into the spirit of all with which we are concerned, the more thoroughly do we become alive. The more completely we do this the more we shall find that we are penetrating into the great secret of Life. It may seem a truism, but the great secret of Life is its Livingness, and it is just more of this quality of Livingness that we want to get hold of; it is that good thing of which we can never ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... no reply whatever to this. He regarded it as a truism unworthy of notice; he evidently felt that a comparison between love ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... changed circumstances under which battles were fought in his own time; and so in 1806 at Jena he smashed to pieces the Prussian force, which came against him in all the pride of inherited traditions, handed down from one of the greatest generals of his age. While it is almost a truism to say that what is appropriate to one age is not suited to another, it is only men of the type of Napoleon and Gordon who are quick enough to see the necessity for a change of method, and sufficiently resourceful to adopt new ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... "Spare me all truism," cried Beatrice. "Ah, sister, I am tired of all this; for eleven years the sea has been singing the same songs; those waves rise and fall as they did a hundred years since; the birds sing the same story; the sun shines the same; even the shadow of the great elms fall over the ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme
... and the labourer had approached to starvation and beggary, the higher were the profits and the more efficient the means of the landholder. This was no theoretical proposition, hastily introduced, it was a practical truism, the result of careful and recent inquiry. He would read to the meeting an account of the population of the parish of Enford, a large parish in the centre of the county of Wilts, with the comparative statement of the rise in the ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... be a truism to suggest that dramatic instinct and dramatic power of expression are naturally the first essentials for success in the art of story-telling, and that, without these, no story-teller would go very far; but I maintain ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... of Pamela has plainly disregarded this useful law. On the other hand, the tedium and elaboration of his style have tended, in these less leisurely days, to condemn his work to a neglect which it does not deserve. Few writers—it is a truism to say so—have excelled him in minute analysis of motive, and knowledge of the human heart. About the final morality of his heroine's long-drawn defence of her chastity it may, however, be permitted ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... is the generalization, indeed the truism or dictum here laid down, that, in only the psychoanalyst knows how many instances, by the analysis of a single, even the very first dream, one can arrive at the rock-bottom depth of the trouble at hand—yes, at the very genesis of the condition. ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... inscribed with the name of Susan Meynell, who died July 14th, 1835, much lamented; and then the text about 'the one sinner that repenteth,' and so on," said Mr. Sheldon, as if he did not care to dwell on so hackneyed a truism. ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... doubtless, eagerly, perhaps noisily and indignantly, to so obvious a truism; but our own efforts in the same direction will not bear us out. Able men in England employ themselves in matters of a more practical character; and while we refuse to avail ourselves of what has been done elsewhere, no book, or books, which we produce on the interpretation ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... as idle and impertinent, you will the next moment hear exclaiming bitterly against the baleful effects of new-fangled systems of philosophy, or gravely descanting on the immense importance of instilling sound principles of morality into the mind. It would not be a bold conjecture, but an obvious truism to say, that all the great changes which have been brought about in the moral world, either for the better or worse, have been introduced not by the bare statement of facts, which are things already known, and which must always operate ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... he is. The following extract from the book shows Mr. Aitken's style, and may perhaps induce some to go to the book itself for more from the same source. He is speaking of the moral sense. "And it is almost a truism to say that, if a man has any taste, it will show itself in his dress and in his dwelling. No doubt, through indolence and slovenly habits, a man may allow his surroundings to fall far below what he is capable of approving; but every one who does so pays ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... fundamental condition of commercial and industrial well-being is financial confidence. If the Public Exchequer of a country lacks confidence, it is a truism to say that consequently commercial confidence must be gravely impaired. The magnates of Lombard Street and Wall Street would view their Irish clients with unpleasant reserve. Irish bankers would in turn restrict advances to their customers, and these again would ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... both bad, is a truism. Of the two, however, the last is the worst. As writes a high authority, "the effects of casual repletion are less prejudicial, and more easily corrected, than those of inanition."[1] Besides, where there has been no injudicious interference, repletion seldom occurs. "Excess is the ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... since one of the first of American statesmen told the national Senate that "Julius Caesar struck down Roman liberty at Pharsalia," and probably there was not one man in his audience who supposed that he was uttering anything beyond a truism, though they must have been puzzled to discover any resemblance between "the mighty Julius" and Mr. Martin Van Buren, the gentleman whom the orator was cutting up, and who was actually in the chair while Mr. Calhoun was seeking ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... a truism is too often regarded as equivalent to placing it in the category of the negligible. It is precisely the salient obviousness, which makes a truth a truism, that places it in the direst peril of oblivion in the stress of modern life. Such a truth was well stated ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... It is a truism that man epitomizes the universe. Therefore, the law of growth, which science names evolution, may be studied and applied with equal precision and accuracy to the individual; to a body of individuals called a nation; and ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... other. "But I never heard any preacher, in any country, tell his congregation anything else. And people always listen with attention. In countries where rain is entirely unknown, it is not a truism to say that 'when it rains it is damp.' On the contrary, in such countries that statement would be regarded as requiring demonstration, and once demonstrated, it would be treasured and taught as an interesting scientific ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... coerced like unmanageable children. The idea of a true, noble womanhood is yet to be created. It does not live in the public mind. Now, in answer to the petition of these two thousand women, the Committee reply that all just governments exist by the consent of the governed. An old truism. We reply, women have given no such consent, and therefore are not bound to allegiance. But our sapient Legislators say, since there are two hundred thousand women in Massachusetts twenty-one years of age, and only two thousand who sign this petition, therefore it is fair ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... of protection has received its most recent expression in this country in the tariff of 1890. It is a truism that no tariff bill, whether passed by free traders or protectionists, can hope to be perfect. It is sure to have defects in detail and some inequalities. The McKinley bill was not exempt from error, but the ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... not married?"—"Non, Monsieur, elle n'est pas encore epousee: mais je lui dis qu'elle ne sera jamais heureuse avant qu'elle le soit." The daughter, who had overheard the conversation, came forward, and looking archly over her shoulder, replied—"ou malheureuse, mon pere!" A sort of truism, expressed by her with singular epigrammatic force, to which there ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... supply the conditions for the existence of thought or knowledge." If this implies that sensations supply the conditions for the existence of our memory of sensations or of our thoughts about sensations, it is a truism which it is hardly worth while to state so solemnly. If it implies that sensations supply anything else, it is obviously erroneous. And if it means, as the context would seem to show it does, that sensations are the subject-matter ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... whether we find it in the myths of the East, the folklore of Europe, the poems of the Troubadours, or in our newspaper of this morning, is based on one or the other of these factors, or on both combined. Now it is a truism that love never played so important a part as now in shaping the destinies of men and women, for this is the only century in which it has obtained even a partial divorce from worldly and parental influences. Moreover the great battle of society, to crush wrong and elevate right, was never before ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... twice about Mrs. Van Dam escaped the reflection that she was a descendant, and Cora with her mind running continually on this shoot of a peculiarly sightly family tree, was as fired by this truism of natural law as if it had lain all the centuries awaiting her discovery. Those delightful magicians of figures, who as easy as asking prove William the Conqueror the mathematical begetter of us all, had hitherto contented her; but such sweets cloyed before ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... quick, sparkling glance of affirmation, as if she had lately had some trouble to maintain that ancient truism. She was going to speak again, but the Doctor waved his hand downward soothingly toward the restless form ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... is there respecting human nature which is absolutely and universally true? We know of only one: and that is not only true, but identical; that men always act from self-interest. This truism the Utilitarians proclaim with as much pride as if it were new, and as much zeal as if it were important. But in fact, when explained, it means only that men, if they can, will do as they choose. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... man." It may be, as he observes, a very simple remark; but, at all events, it has one advantage over his own, which is, that it is a very true one. Miss Martineau makes an observation in her book, which is quite as great a truism as mine; for she also says that "Human nature ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... the ancient philosophers of Athens and Syracuse. Here are we, the living men of to-day, watching the corpse of a departed world upon which the mystic symbol of Psyche has just alighted. Tempus breve est is the simple little truism that rises to our reflecting minds. Eighteen centuries between the Vettii and ourselves! They are gone like a flash, and we are amazed to note how little has our nature altered either for the better or the worse within that space of time, long enough if ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... paintings. If I could report a dinner-table conversation, I might be tempted to say something of my talk with Mr. Oliphant. I like well enough conversation which floats safely over the shallows, touching bottom at intervals with a commonplace incident or truism to push it along; I like better to find a few fathoms of depth under the surface; there is a still higher pleasure in the philosophical discourse which calls for the deep sea line to reach bottom; but best of all, when one is in the right mood, is the contact of intelligences when they ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... again forced to notice the truism thrusting itself forward so often and conspicuously; that law was essentially made by the great criminals of society, and that, thus far it has been a frightful instrument, based upon force, for legalizing theft on ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... regarding cooking as a menial and vulgar labor; and those who give some thought to their daily food usually gain in vigor and cheerfulness. It is a truism that food is concentrated force. The manipulation of a motive power capable of invigorating both body and mind, is an occupation worthy to employ intelligence and skill. In countries where the people depend upon meagre supplies ...
— The Cooking Manual of Practical Directions for Economical Every-Day Cookery • Juliet Corson
... rather a long tale to tell, for it takes 432 pages in the unravelling. It ends with a beautiful avowal that "the heart is no more unchanging than the mind, and that love's not immortal, but an illusion." As the utterer of this truism is a young married woman, it would seem that the foundation is laid for a sequel to Disenchantment that might be appropriately ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 6, 1890 • Various
... too, Jews have made a prominent position for themselves. It suffices to mention Meyerbeer and Offenbach, representatives of two widely divergent departments of the art. Again, to assert the prominence of Jews as actors is uttering a truism. Adolf Jellinek, one of the closest students of the racial characteristics of Jews, thinks that they are singularly well equipped for the theatrical profession by reason of their marked subjectivity, which always induces objective, disinterested devotion to a purpose, and their cosmopolitanism, ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... it, and vowed to have it at any cost; but we have not found for it a definite place in a philosophy of life. Superficial though he be, our friend has indicated a need: we must take the question philosophically—but in the great and true sense. It is a truism of philosophy and science that the world is a harmonious whole, and that with the increase of knowledge, laws can be discovered to explain the order and the unity of the universe. Accordingly, if ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... the counsel to search not only libraries but his own brain for the strongest reasons that he can summon upon which to base a judgment in behalf of his client. Why is it that a great Bar makes a great court? Though it may seem a truism, I repeat, it is because the great Bar furnishes to the court all the reasons that can possibly be urged in each case and enables it to select from among all the reasons developed by the ingenuity and intense interest of men skilled in ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft
... pioneer sunbeam answered this question with a truism, not always as applicable as in this case,—"A brave, able, self-respecting manhood is fair profit for any man's first thirty ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... in 1647: "There are many particulars relating to the construction of instruments which are unknown to modern artificers, as, namely, that the best strings are made when the north and the worst when the south wind blows," a truism well understood by experienced string manufacturers. Thomas Mace, in his curious book on the Lute, enters at some length into the question of strings, and speaks in glowing terms of his Venetian Catlins. The ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... a truism to declare that human nature is about as complicated a piece of machinery as could be found in the human world. And yet I do not know why it should be considered so. All things and all men do not run in grooves. A man to be a criminal need not be hopelessly bad in every other ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... at this truism, but were quieted by the shout of a boy that the preacher was a-coming; whereupon the reverend gentleman elbowed his way through the guests to the quiet couple, and requested them to stand up. A few ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... Phillip adroitly. And much as we speak of the uncertainties of this world, the latter remark might be accepted as a truism in regard to the pecuniary ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... is the best nurse of talent has long been a most humiliating truism; and the fountain of the Muses, bursting from a barren rock, is but too apt an emblem of the hard source from which much of the genius of this world has issued. How strongly the young translators of Aristaenetus were under the influence of this sort ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... will say that it is true; in fact, that is just as true as that two and two make four: exactly as true as that, but let it be noted most profoundly, only as true as that. In other words, it is a truism, mere equation in terms, telling nothing whatever. When I say that two and two make four I find, after deep thought, that I have really said nothing, or nothing that was not already said at the moment I defined two and defined ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... morality, may mean either that it would be inconsistent with his immutability to reverse the laws he had himself established, or that he is compelled by his nature to impose certain rules, and no others. The first supposition is a truism; the second is not proved. For, since Mr. Mansel has discarded as a fiction any 'absolute law of duty,' it is hard to conjecture whence he could derive any compulsory choice of rules. Why God commands ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... revolutionists is that they are not at all revolutionary. They are the party of platitude. They do not shake religion: rather religion seems to shake them. They can only answer the great paradox by repeating the truism. ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... they do not know how passions originate in the mind. But, if people would consider the nature of substance, they would have no doubt about the truth of Prop. vii. In fact, this proposition would be a universal axiom, and accounted a truism. For, by substance, would be understood that which is in itself, and is conceived through itself—that is, something of which the conception requires not the conception of anything else; whereas modifications exist in something external ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza
... many. For example, I, being many, that is to say, having many parts or members, am yet also one, and partake of the one, being one of seven who are here present (compare Philebus). This is not an absurdity, but a truism. But I should be amazed if there were a similar entanglement in the nature of the ideas themselves, nor can I believe that one and many, like and unlike, rest and motion, in the abstract, are capable either ...
— Parmenides • Plato
... notation. Many of them would open their eyes were you to tell them, for instance, that the number of fingers on your two hands may be just as correctly expressed by the figures 11, 12, 13, 14, or 15, as by the figures 10,—a truism perfectly familiar to every one acquainted with the generalizations of higher arithmetic. Yet it is up-hill work to make the matter quite clear to a beginner. We may wisely therefore give our children at first an arbitrary rule for notation. We give them an equally arbitrary rule for ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... seem like the grave enunciation of a truism to say that another indispensable qualification of the translator is perfect familiarity with the language from which he translates, and a full command of his own. It is not by mere reading that such a familiarity ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... be taken as a truism that "the man in the street" (collectively, the "general public") knows little and cares less for what is called physical science. Now and again when something remarkable happens, such as a great ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... hope for the best about everybody, and not to expect the worst. This sounds like a truism, but it has comforted me before now, and some day you'll find it useful. One has always to try to think more of others than of oneself, and it is best not to prejudge people on the bad side. My sermons aren't long, are they? Have ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... hush in the Executive Chamber. The feet of those who entered made no sound on the thick carpet. Those who were in the chamber offered evidence of the truism that there are situations where words fail to do ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... works; as if the enduring quality of his fame rested in and was dependent upon the tangible products of his genius or his skill. There is truth in the phrase even when its scope is limited to this obvious meaning; but there is a deeper truth behind the truism,—the truth that a man lives in his works, not only because they commemorate but because they express him. They are products of his skill; but they are also the products of his soul. The man is revealed ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... have been growing poorer for the last fifty years, and have now come to so low a state that it becomes us to inquire whether it is not in our power to better ourselves. It is an old familiar truth—a truism—that it is easier to destroy than to restore or build up; nevertheless, some comfort is to be got from the reflection that in this matter we have up till now been working against Nature. She loves not to bring forth food where ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... to the practice of the best poets, of all countries and in all ages, as authorizing the opinion, (deduced from all the foregoing,) that in every import of the word essential, which would not here involve a mere truism, there may be, is, and ought to be an essential difference between the language of ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... to say, that the mind's acting is always as the mind's acting! or, in other words, that a thing is always as itself! Thus, his great fundamental proposition is, in one form, a glaring absurdity; and in the other, it is an insignificant truism; and there is no escape from this dilemma except through a return to a better psychology, to a sounder analysis of the great ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... seem a truism to us? Then let us remember that it was no truism in the days when it was made. "The Church as by law established" was then a phrase on everybody's lips in Great Britain; and, strangely enough, it meant, and still means, ...
— Report Of Commemorative Services With The Sermons And Addresses At The Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885. • Diocese Of Connecticut
... ourselves?" let me begin by asking. "Yes." "Upon what ground? The ground of their enmity? The ground of the wrong they do us?" "No." "In virtue of cruelty, heartlessness, injustice, disrespect, misrepresentation?" "Certainly not. Humanum est errare is a truism; but it possesses, like most truisms, a latent germ of worthy truth. The very word errare is a sign that there is a way so truly the human that, for a man to leave it, is to wander. If it be human to wander, yet the wandering is not humanity. The ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... though it were a self-evident truism, that we cannot know that anything exists which we do not know. It is inferred that whatever can in any way be relevant to our experience must be at least capable of being known by us; whence it follows ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... truism to say that the whole is made up of its parts, but all the same we often lose sight of this in our outlook ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... zodiac to account for the fall of the sparrow, and the thirteen at table to explain the gentleman's death. It is of little more scientific value than the Oriental method of replying to whatever question arises by the unimpeachable truism, "God is great." Not to fall back on the gods, where a proximate principle may be found, has with us Westerners long since become the sign of an efficient as ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... domestic hatreds, the petty spites, with ALL creeds equally blood-guilty, one cannot but be amazed that the concurrent voice of mankind has not placed bigotry at the very head of the deadly sins. It is surely a truism to say that neither smallpox nor the plague have brought the same misery ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... and observation into a single saying. It is the very opposite of dissertation and declamation; its distinction is not so much ingenuity, as good sense brought to a point; it ought to be neither enigmatical nor flat, neither a truism on the one hand, nor a riddle on the other. These wise sayings, said Bacon, the author of some of the wisest of them, are not only for ornament, but for action and business, having a point or edge, ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... may be rated a truism—it being evidently true that a thing or Being, which has existed from eternity without any eternal cause of its existence, must be self-existent: but of course that dogma leaves the disputed question, namely, whether matter, or something not matter, is self-existent, just where ...
— Superstition Unveiled • Charles Southwell
... significance in the making of such conversation with one's self at all. The Logos, the reasonable spark, in man, is common to him with the gods—koinos auto pros tous theous—cum diis communis. That might seem but the truism of a certain school of philosophy; but in Aurelius was clearly an original and lively apprehension. There could be no inward conversation with one's self such as this, unless there were indeed some one else, aware of our actual thoughts and feelings, pleased or displeased at [48] ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... Andrews, here reproduced in facsimile, should bear the signature, as witness, of the very man whose "innate goodness" is there immortalised. If there be any detractors of Fielding's personal character still to be found, they may be advised to remember the truism that a man is known by his friends, and to apply themselves to a study of William Young in ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... assurance, has declared poetry the most philosophical of all writings—but it required a Wordsworth to pronounce it the most metaphysical. He seems to think that the end of poetry is, or should be, instruction; yet it is a truism that the end of our existence is happiness; if so, the end of every separate part of our existence, everything connected with our existence, should be still happiness. Therefore the end of instruction should be happiness; and happiness is another ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... of the young lady was an entrancing picture of animated indignation as she gave utterance to this truism which her countrymen are so slow to appreciate. I experienced a glow ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... denying a simple central power, but of balancing the brain in a bewilderment of new powers which seem to overlap and might even conflict. Nature herself has become unnatural. The wind is blowing from the other side of the desert, not now with noble truism "There is no God but God," but rather with that other motto out of the deeper anarchy of Asia, drawn out by Mr. Kipling, in the shape of a native proverb, in the very story already mentioned; "Your gods and my gods, do you or I know which is the stronger?" ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... but Mark understood that she assented to his truism, and they walked on as silent as the long shadows that followed them. A quarter of a mile from the high road the path reached the edge of the wold and dipped over into a wood which was sparse just below the brow, but which grew denser ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... an idea which has at present all the unpopularity of a truism; so that we tend to forget that it was not so very long ago that it had the more practical unpopularity which attaches to a new truth. Ingratitude is surely the chief of the intellectual sins of man. ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... plagiarist, and imitator that all time has brought forth. This, however, did not shake his faith in the poet's greatness; and to reconcile what to some would appear contradictory positions, he proposes the fact, I might say the truism, that the greatest man is not the most original, but the "most indebted" man. This, in the sense in which it is true, is saying no more than that the educated man is better than the savage; but, in the apologetic sense intended, it is equivalent to affirming that the greatest thief ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 55, November 16, 1850 • Various
... the great spiritual truth, that wicked thoughts and impulses, which circumstances prevent from passing into wicked acts, are still deeds in the sight of God; but the living truth subsides into a dead truism, as enforced by commonplace preachers. In "Fancy's Show-Box," Hawthorne seizes the prolific idea; and the respectable merchant and respected church-member, in the still hour of his own meditation, convicts himself of being a liar, cheat, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... hour of her greatest wandering from the path of rectitude. The story is not an illustration of the "pleasures of hope;" but an attempt to show the young reader that what we most desire, in moral and spiritual, as well as worldly things, we labor the hardest to obtain—a truism adopted by the heroine in the form of the principal title of ...
— Hope and Have - or, Fanny Grant Among the Indians, A Story for Young People • Oliver Optic
... thousands of such productions have disappeared in the conflagrations of Rome, the vandalisms of the ignorant, or the kilns and melting-pots of the Middle Ages. The quality is still more a source of delight than the quantity. This last sentence, of course, contains a truism, since art is no delight without high quality. If we had only preserved to us such masterpieces as the Capitoline Venus, the Dying Gaul, the Laocoon, the Dancing Faun, the so-called Narcissus, and the Resting Mercury, we should realise something ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... was, Jack had arrived at a just appreciation of the truism, "Opportunity makes the thief." His respect for Mrs. Fox had expired after the episode on her moonlight verandah, and though he had made excuses for her, he was conscious they had rung hollow. Yet, in spite of his strict upbringing and the knowledge of ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi |
