"Credulity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... little sitting-rooms for Marian, with a window opening into the garden, and a door into the drawing-room, and then came letters to architects and calculations with builders, and reckonings that the house should be habitable by next September, and Mr. Wortley laughing at their credulity for expecting it. ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... beans and bannocks, and occasionally potatoes, and rarely a pudding, with coffee, rich and steaming, to wash all down, pipes would follow, and then yarns of adventures, possible and impossible, all exciting and wonderful, and all received with the greatest credulity. ...
— The Sky Pilot • Ralph Connor
... time of her condemnation and that of her execution, Cotton Mather took the eldest Goodwin child into his family, and kept her there all winter. He has told the story of her extraordinary doings, in a style of blind and absurd credulity that cannot be surpassed. "Ere long," says he, "I thought it convenient for me to entertain my congregation with a Sermon on the memorable providence, wherein these children had been concerned, ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... objection, both with the old and the new forms of infidelity, is, that against the miracles; the main argument with both, those which attempt to show their antecedent impossibility; and criticism directed against the credulity of the records which contain them. The principal difference is, that modern infidelity shrinks from the coarse imputation of fraud and imposture on the founders of Christianity; and prefers the theory ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... priests, men of letters—but what a gulf between him and them! What motives, what beliefs, what embryonic processes of thought and morals, what bizarre combinations of ignorance and knowledge, of the highest sanctity with the lowest credulity or falsehood; what extraordinary prepossessions, born with a man and tainting his whole ways of seeing and thinking from childhood to the grave! Amid all the intellectual dislocation of the spectacle, indeed, he perceives certain Greeks and certain Latins ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... "You may ask that question, and taunt me with my being single, and with my credulity, as you will, Master Openshaw. You'll get no answer from me. As for the brooch, and the story of theft and burglary; if any friend ever came to see me (which I defy you to prove, and deny), he'd be just as much above doing such a thing as ...
— A House to Let • Charles Dickens
... is lively and agreeable, but we cannot call it either elegant or correct. He tells some "traveller's stories;" for instance, one about catching an eagle's feather on horseback (pp. 103, 104). True he "has the feather to show;" but on the whole he makes not too many overdrafts upon the credulity of his readers, and does not ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... days. They call it a great miracle. But I think the resurrection from the peaceful slumber of a three days' grave is not nearly so miraculous as the actual coming back to life from a living death of fourteen years duration;—'tis the twentieth century resurrection, not based on ignorant credulity, nor assisted by any Oriental jugglery. No travelers ever return, the poets say, from the Land of Shades beyond the river Styx—and may be it is a good thing for them that they don't—but you can see that there is an occasional exception even to that rule, for I have just returned ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... italics began he would have stretched our credulity to the utmost. But if "our people" meant to him American Socialists, we readily believe that invading Bolsheviki, coming to wrest the American dictatorship from our native talent, would find themselves and their undesirable "form of government" pitched into the sea ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... Charlie that amiable temperament which inclines its happy possessor to sympathise much with others, to talk little of self, to believe all things and to hope all things, to the verge almost of infantine credulity. ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... intelligence, I none the less deeply regretted my mistake, for I had uttered suspicions of the observer's powers of discernment, unjust suspicions which the translator's inaccuracy led me into entertaining. May this note serve to mitigate the harshness of the strictures provoked by my overtaxed credulity! I do not scruple to attack ideas which I consider false; but Heaven forfend that I should ever attack those who uphold ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... story of the Christ, the natives exclaimed 'El Dorado'—the golden. The ignorant sailors and adventurers seized upon the literal meaning, instead of the spiritual one. The time, being that of Don Quixote and of the Inquisition, accounts for the childish credulity on one side and the unparalleled ferocity on the other. The search for El Dorado, whether it was believed to be a fabulous country of gold, or an inaccessible mountain, or a lake, or a city, or a priest who anointed himself with a fragrant oil and sprinkled his body with fine gold dust, must always ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... confession that I was at one time myself a confiding dupe of the "tradition of the dairymaids." While attending medical college I was told that inoculation with cow pox virus was a certain preventive of small-pox, and like most other medical students I accepted with childlike faith and credulity the dictum of my teachers as so much infallible wisdom. After an experience derived from treating a number of cases of post-vaccinal small-pox in patients who gave evidence of having been recently and successfully vaccinated, I awoke to a realisation of the unpleasant fact that "protective ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... they are vouched for by respectable though not numerous authorities., Still, he groups them together in one complete and continuous story, and gives them to the world as history; nor does the world impute to him either dishonesty, ignorance, credulity, or shallowness, because in every single event he does not specify the exact amount of evidence ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... more chicanery. Or was it strategy, pure and simple? Was there at the bottom of his words the wish to see me nearer or was he just playing with the credulity of such believers as the man next me, for instance? I did not stop to determine. My anxiety to see Madame, without the illusion of even the short distance between us, induced me to join the file of the faithful who were slowly approaching the seated woman. ...
— The Bronze Hand - 1897 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... ready sympathies and superstitions of the primitive mind of the south of Ireland. She was in a maze of excitement, and his difficulty was not to get her to talk, but to arrest her incoherent flood of invocations, saints' names, and credulity. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... guidance of the ablest that Rome could furnish. Jugurtha adhered to his inevitable plan of a prolonged and desultory campaign over a vast area of country; the size and physical character of his kingdom, the extraordinary mobility of his troops, the credulity and anxious ambition of his opponent, were all elements of strength which he used with consummate skill. He retired before the threatening column; then, that his men might not lose heart, he threw himself with startling suddenness on the foe; at other times he mocked the consul with hopes of peace, ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... Martius. Once more visions of the night began to afflict him; he consulted the priests and discovered the cause; he required yet to be initiated into the mysteries of Osiris. The priests of Corinth had worked upon his credulity to such good effect, that he found himself in serious financial difficulties, but by practising as a lawyer he succeeded in making a sufficient income to provide more than adequately for the expenses of this fresh initiation (Metamorph. xi. 28, 30). While at Rome he made the acquaintance of Aemilianus ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... of "the crucified sophist," who was their adorable Lord; their guilelessness; their brotherly love; their strict discipline; their common meals; their union; their benevolence; their joy in death. The points which he depicts in his satire are, their credulity in giving way to Peregrinus; their unintelligent belief in Christ and in immortality; their factiousness in aiding Peregrinus when in prison; their pompous vanity in martyrdom, and possibly their tendency to believe legends respecting a martyr's death. His satire is contempt, ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... "Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantom of hope—who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow," need not attend to the history ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... so called from an Italian doctor who had imposed on the credulity of a former prince. The rooms were large, airy, pleasant, and looked upon the garden; but the walls were of great thickness (for the tower was old), and the windows were heavily barred. The Prince, followed ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the water. As the novelty wore off, people began to doubt and reason about it. Had the place been traversed by a ghost or disturbed by a witch they could have acquiesced in it very quietly; but this outlandish belief in fairies was altogether an overtask for Yankee credulity. As might have been expected, the little strangers, unable to breathe in an atmosphere of doubt and suspicion, soon took their leave, shaking off the dust of their elfin feet as a testimony against an unbelieving generation. It was, indeed, said that certain rude fellows from the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... of patent medicines is mysticism. Ignorance is the mother of credulity. It is reported[13] that Cato, the elder, recommended cabbages as a panacea for all sorts of ills, that he treated dislocations of the limbs by incantations, and ordered the Greek physicians out of Rome. ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various
... in his character as doctor of medicine and teller of fortunes, of the weakness of human nature and strength of common credulity, the learned Alexander Bendo vanished from the city; and about the same time the gallant Earl of Rochester appeared at court, where he sought for and obtained the merry monarch's pardon. The wonderful stories he was enabled to relate, piquant in detail, and sparkling with wit, rendered it delightful ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... baits, To hasten too, too hasty Fates, Unless it be The fond credulity Of silly fish, which worldling like, still look Upon the bait, but never on the hook; Nor envy, unless among The birds, for prize ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... peace, in order to injure the land which gave them birth. But they will no longer find the impious bands who were the instruments of their first crimes; terror has dissolved them, or justice has purged our country of their presence. They will no longer find that credulity they abused, or that hatred which once sharpened their daggers. Surrounded everywhere by the public power, everywhere within the grasp of the tribunals, these horrible wretches will be able henceforth ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... a son called William Ramsay, who appears to have possessed all his father's credulity. He became an astrologer, and in 1651-2 published "Vox Stellarum, an Introduction to the Judgment of Eclipses and the Annual Revolutions of the World." The edition of 1652 is inscribed, to his father. It would appear, as indeed it might be argued from his ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... whom I placed implicit confidence: it certainly was not based upon any research or knowledge of my own, as I had not at that time perused a single Report of the Society, nor a page in its organ, the African Repository. My approval was the offspring of credulity and ignorance. I am explicit on this point, because my opponents have accused me of inconsistency—though it ought not surely to disgrace a man, that, discovering himself to be in error, he promptly turns ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... trees, new men, new animals, new stars; nothing bounded, nothing trite, nothing which had the bloom taken off it by much previous description! The early voyagers moreover, were like children coming out to take their first gaze into the world, with ready credulity and unlimited fancy, willing to believe in fairies and demons, Amazons and mystic islands, "forms of a lower hemisphere," and fountains of ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... two-bunched camel from "Bukhtar" (Bactria), the "Eastern" (Bakhtar) region on the Amu or Jayhun (Oxus) River; afterwards called Khorasan. The two-humped camel is never seen in Arabia except with northern caravans, and to speak of it would be a sore test of Badawi credulity. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... a certain aspect he is," I said, dismissing my remark lightly. "As I was saying, Mr. Razumov, when you have lived long enough, you will learn to discriminate between the noble trustfulness of a nature foreign to every meanness and the flattered credulity of some women; though even the credulous, silly as they may be, unhappy as they are sure to be, are never absolute fools. It is my belief that no woman is ever completely deceived. Those that are lost leap into the abyss with their eyes open, if all ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... are dependent on the various aspects of the stars and conjunctions of the planets, the most unfounded apprehensions, as well as the most delusive hopes, have been excited by the professors of this fallacious science. Such impositions on the credulity of mankind are founded on the grossest absurdity and the most palpable ignorance of the nature of things; still, in the midst of the light of science which the present century has shed upon the world, the astrologer meets with a rich support[32] even ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... and deserved a little help. He had done well enough so far, but he scarcely understood how near to the edge of Mrs. Ascher's credulity he ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... fable which he had been compelled to foist upon one of the old masters than for the immeasurably graver offence against society and another Old Boy. This, indeed, did not worry him at all; and the story was received next day with absolute credulity on all sides. Nasmyth himself was the first to thank us both for our spirited effort on his behalf; and the incident had the ironic effect of establishing an immediate entente cordiale between Raffles and his very latest victim. I must confess, ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... our vision is ever enlarging. The road remains, but the traveller moves on. With the living every day has some new light. Creeds are crystallized statements of truth; truth is vital and cannot be contained in unchanging forms. Credulity blindly accepts yesterday's picture of truth; faith, with open ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... which Dozon sent me, and want the original dreadfully for Sheykh Yussuf, to show him that he and I are supported by such an authority as the great Ameer in our notions about the real unity of the Faith. The book is a curious mixture of good sense and credulity—quite 'Arab of the Arabs.' I will write a paper on the popular beliefs of Egypt; it will be curious, I think. By the way, I see in the papers and reviews speculations as to some imaginary Mohammedan conspiracy, because of the very great number of pilgrims last year from ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... his head with an air of serious concern. There was a look of commiseration in his eyes for her credulity, and shameful duping by the cunning ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... mercenary, incompetent, drunken Mexican doctor who cared little enough whether the dog of an American lived or died so long as he himself continued to get the generous checks from a certain newspaper in New York City. The doctor held the credulity of the men who mailed those checks in fine contempt and proceeded to feather his nest valiantly while his good luck continued, going on many a glorious spree at the paper's expense while Dick Carson went down every day deeper into the valley of the ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... ones is especially great; for where could any superstition find a more favorable soil than in this seat of philosophical half-culture, or over-culture; of the worship of Serapis, of astrology, of societies of Mystics, of visionaries and exorcisers, and of incredulity—the twin-sister of credulity. Be cautious then to hold back from baptism all those who regard it as a preserving charm or an act of good omen—remembering that the same water which, sprinkled on sanctified hearts, leads them to holy living, brings death to the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Protestations they made to submit to him in any thing, and to stand by and assist him in whatever he Commanded them to the last Drop, much with the same Zeal and Forwardness, as our Life-and-Fortune Men did here in England. I say, when all this was consider'd, I could not so much condemn his Credulity, nor blame him for believing them, for no Man could have doubted their Sincerity, but he that at the same time must have Taxt ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... the glorious and transcendent deeds of Napoleon; when they shall number the blessings which he dispensed, and the victories which he gained, never will they believe that one man can have worked such miracles in so short a period. They will rather fancy that the historian was playing with the credulity of posterity, that he culled out all the great deeds performed by successive generations of the greatest men during an infinite series of ages, and that he has attributed them ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... trivial. As with Zinzendorf and his united brethren, so with Wesley and his co-workers and disciples. Their aims were exalted, their labours noble, the results which they achieved were immense. But intermingled with it all there was so much weakness and credulity, so much weight given to the workings of a heated and over-wrought imagination, so many openings to a blind fanaticism, such morbid extravagances, so much from which sober reason and cultivated intellect shrank with instinctive repulsion, that ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... nobles who, by means of the public credulity at this time, gained sums sufficient to repair their ruined fortunes, may be mentioned the names of the Dukes de Bourbon, de Guiche, de la Force,[10] de Chaulnes, and d'Antin; the Marechal d'Estrees; ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... to accept Darwins or any other derivative theory as true. The time has not come for that, and perhaps never will. We also advise against a similar credulity on the other side, in a blind faith that species—that the manifold sorts and forms of existing animals and vegetables—"have no secondary cause." The contrary is already not unlikely, and we suppose will hereafter become more and more probable. But we are confident ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... what to do with the wonderful sheath, and I was not in want of money, but I should have considered myself dishonoured if I had given it to him for nothing; besides, I thought it a good joke to levy a contribution upon the ignorant credulity of a count palatine created by the grace of the Pope. In after days, however, I would willingly have refunded his money, but, as fate would have it, we did not see each other for a long time, and when I met him again I was not in a position to return the amount. It is, therefore, only ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... evidence was concerned, of an absurd triviality. Even in the private circles, where no trace of fraud could be suspected, the good faith of all entering them being assured, I found sometimes such extraordinary credulity that the subject would have been offensive to any dispassionate investigator who was not, like myself, determined to get to the bottom of it. The majority of the persons who entered into a circle were ready to believe any extraordinary thing that came to them, and the inanity of the general ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... love, you and I have no longer the right to smile at the credulity of others. I, since the French campaign, when I met with that extraordinary adventure, which, to this day, I am quite ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... free-thinking, without running the unhappy lengths that Mr. Wood tells us, it was reported he had done. We have many instances of characters being too lightly taken up on report, and mistakenly represented thro' a too easy credulity; especially against a man who may happen to differ from us in some speculative points, wherein each party however, may think himself Orthodox: The good Dr. Clarke himself, has been as ill spoken of ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... believers, he is always the first to come and the last to remain. No word of anger has ever crossed his lips—no look of impatience has ever appeared in his eyes. Though sorrowful, he is gentle; though suffering, he is industrious. I have trusted him with all I possess, and I glory in my credulity! Ulpius is incorruptible!' ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... it appears to have been the origin of a tradition still current amongst the peasantry of Scotland, and which ascribes a miraculous power to the bonnet of the Wizard. It is curious to find the tale of the invulnerable cervilerium of the Italians, travelling on the breath of credulity and superstition into the "far north countrie" of which the Magician was a native, and only changed by tradition from the blue steel worked and welded by magic art, into the blue bonnet which was waited on by Scottish demons, who were heard wailing in mid air when ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 492 - Vol. 17, No. 492. Saturday, June 4, 1831 • Various
... dealers in wild lands—ye speculators in the folly and credulity of your fellow men—what a mass of misery, and of misrepresentation productive of that misery, have ye not to answer for! You had your acres to sell, and what to you were the worn-down frames and broken hearts of the infatuated purchasers? The public believed the plausible ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... old man until he finished. By that time the storm had ceased and the sky, suddenly clearing in the west, revealed the last rays of the setting sun, which brightened the room for a few moments. I laughed softly when Uncle Ashby went out, and all that I had heard of the ignorance, credulity, and superstition of the Southern negro came into my mind. I sat for a while, musing in the gathering dusk, and then went up to ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... reminiscences, told quietly and calmly, here a little, there a little, without chronological order, each one touched upon as it happened to suggest itself. From wondering I found myself every now and then believing: but whenever I realized the folly in which I was indulging myself, I shook off my credulity and endeavored to listen with interest, but without judgment, for in this way only could I most thoroughly enjoy the strange narrative; but my lapses into ...
— The Vizier of the Two-Horned Alexander • Frank R. Stockton
... they were enforced with all the weight of authority which accompanies supreme power, received the overture, that now came from him in the situation to which he had descended, with great indifference, and would hardly deign to listen to it. Charles, ashamed of his own credulity in having imagined that he might accomplish now that which he had attempted formerly without success, desisted finally from his scheme. He then resigned the government of the empire, and, having transferred ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... public; and were confirmed by travelers fresh from the Mississippi, and doubtless bribed, who had seen the mines in question, and declared them superior in richness to those of Mexico and Peru. Nay, more, ocular proof was furnished to public credulity, in ingots of gold conveyed to the mint, as if just brought from ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... him. In his book The Jew, published after his death, [242] he lashes the whole people. He seems in its pages to be constantly running up and down with a whip and saying: "I'll teach you to be 'an Ebrew Jew,' I will." His credulity and prejudice are beyond belief. He accepts every malicious and rancorous tale told against the Jews, and records as historical facts even such problematical stories as the murder of Hugh of Lincoln. Thus he managed to exasperate representatives of almost every class. ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... Archie Swinton. Company—Sir Alexander and Lady Keith, Mr. and Mrs. Anderson, Clanronald, etc. Clanronald told us, as an instance of Highland credulity, that a set of his kinsmen, Borradale and others, believing that the fabulous Water Cow inhabited a small lake near his house, resolved to drag the monster into day. With this view they bivouacked by the side of the lake, in which ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... place," said the king, "in what way can you possibly have offended me? I cannot perceive how. Surely not on account of a young girl's harmless and very innocent jest? You turned the credulity of a young man into ridicule—it was very natural to do so; any other woman in your place ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... will be described presently. The best devices of these inventors were finally embodied, and in the resulting instrument we have one of the chiefest of those modern wonders whose first appearance taxed the credulity of mankind. [Footnote: There were, until a recent period, a line of statements, alleged facts and reasonings, that were incredible in proportion to intelligence. The occurrences of recent times have reversed this rule with regard ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... Southern people uneducated and ignorant, as the predominant fact respecting a majority of their population? Why is the state of popular information in that whole region of a nominally free country, such as to make it an easy thing to impose upon their credulity and instruct them into a full belief in the most absurd and monstrous fabrications, or falsifications of the truth? Why were the ordinary sources of information excluded from their minds, more than from ours, or from the population ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... under its influence. It is all the more conspicuous in tropical natures, for there youth is exuberant. In all primitive states of religion we notice the same abandonment, the same illusions produced on the imagination, the contortions of the body, the child-like credulity, the superstition, the depression, and exaltations of the feelings, "the agony, the ecstasy, the plentitude of belief." They are the complement of barbaric faith, and not a peculiarity of the Negro. If in these ...
— The Defects of the Negro Church - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 10 • Orishatukeh Faduma
... Knowledge puts faith out of the question, for faith to me means a trusting on spiritual grounds. And surely the acceptance of scriptural statements like that of the miraculous birth without investigation is not faith—it is mere credulity. If Jesus had been born in a miraculous way, the disciples must have known it. Joseph must have known it when he heard the answer 'I must be about my father's business,' ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... millions—your inheritance!" cried the Doge, still amazed and sceptical as he sounded the preposterousness of this idea to worldly credulity. ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... I know that I could never get him to see the real truth about me; I might tell him that I have let myself be tied up in a golden net—but he would only marvel at my spirituality. Oh, the women I have seen trading upon the credulity of men! And when I think how I did this myself! If men were wise, they would give us the vote, and a share in the world's work—anything that would bring us out into the light of day, and break the spell of mystery ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... is little reward in being a dog, unless you cheat yourself by believing more than the facts warrant. But presently he is up to dash at a bird, with a fine forgetfulness, quite as startled by the trick of flight as in his first days. And I, envying him his gift of credulity, weakly ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... good an opinion of her own beauty to believe anything in England could efface it, while Madame Kielmansegg attached herself to the one thing necessary—getting what money she could by the sale of places, and the credulity of those who thought themselves very ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... of the age to which they belong; (9) That religion, literature and government are, at the best, the products and not the causes of civilization; (10) That the progress of civilization varies directly as "scepticism," the disposition to doubt and to investigate, and inversely as "credulity" or "the protective spirit," a disposition to maintain, without ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... laws of nature. I was as well as usual. I had read nothing of late that could have conjured up such a figure. As to preternatural manifestations of such a kind—I had but that very day, and but an hour or two ago, passed supercilious judgment on what I thought the credulity of ignorant rustics. And yet here I was, the victim to some such hallucination—unless it was possible that I had really seen the figure with my bodily eyes! My knees were shaking under me as I managed to reach my room, my whole being agitated by ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... wonders of darker and less pure minds with a science of its own, which she called Gospel light. Still, there was here a sign and there a legend that she clung to for old acquaintance' sake, rather than by reason of any credulity in her strong enough to take the place of faith. But these constituted the peculiar poetry of her personality, the fireside balladry and folk-lore of her Aunt-Judyness; and I could no more mock them than I could mock the good fairy in her, that changed all my floggings ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... absurd on their face, especially when I add that I am a young man apparently of about thirty years of age, that no person can be blamed for refusing to read another word of what promises to be a mere imposition upon his credulity. Nevertheless I earnestly assure the reader that no imposition is intended, and will undertake, if he shall follow me a few pages, to entirely convince him of this. If I may, then, provisionally assume, with the pledge of justifying the assumption, that I know ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... Sect. XIV. 2. 5. And also by comparing the tribes of ideas, which the symbols of pictures, or of languages, suggest to us, by intuitive analogy with our previous experience, that is, with the common course of nature. See Class III. 2. 2. 3. on Credulity. ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... alleged to have a gradient of 34 per cent., with twenty-three persons on board. As 25 per cent. is regarded as the maximum safe gradient for an Abt rack railway, since the cog-wheel is liable to climb out of the rack on any steeper grade, it will be seen that the strain upon the credulity of the hearer of this story is almost as great as that upon the car must ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... of the Roman Empire, vol. I., chapter 2, says: "The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true, by the philosophers as equally false and by the magistrate as equally useful. Both the interests of the priests and the credulity of the people were sufficiently respected. In their writings and conversation the philosophers of antiquity asserted the independent dignity of reason, but they resigned their actions to the commands of law and custom. ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... many women then did Theseus wish to carry off for Pirithous? Pradon manages this much better: when Theseus is asked by a confidant if he really had been in the world below, he answers, how could any sensible man possibly believe so silly a tale! he merely availed himself of the credulity of the people, and gave out this report from ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... cunning and adroitness than any one of the fraternity that I ever met with. I was a thousand times forewarned of him, by some of his old friends; but I was over confident, and I met my reward, as my eyes were not opened till I had suffered to the amount of many thousands of pounds by my credulity. ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... avenging sword is uplifted, and that, unless they fly to the cross and embrace it by a living faith, they must sink to perdition—and you will witness the smile of derision or the frown of indignation. They esteem the doctrine of the Trinity as a monument of human credulity and folly. Their feelings are shocked beyond measure, at the incarnation of Deity, in the person of Jesus Christ. The personality and direct influences of the Holy Spirit appear useless and incredible; and the necessity of ...
— The National Preacher, Vol. 2 No. 7 Dec. 1827 • Aaron W. Leland and Elihu W. Baldwin
... (2 syl.). His credulity and faith in Tartuffe, like that of his mother, can scarcely be shaken even by the evidence of his senses. He hopes against hope, and fights every inch of ground in defence of the religious hypocrite.—Moli['e]re, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... in the cause of Scriptural truths were crowned by one immortal achievement, his Translation of the Bible into the English tongue. This mighty work drew on him, indeed, the bitter hatred of all who were making merchandise of the popular credulity and ignorance, but he found abundant reward in the blessing of his countrymen of every rank and age, to whom he unfolded the words of Eternal Light. His mortal remains were interred near this spot, but they were not allowed to rest in peace. After a lapse of many years ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... the application of this to the free criticism of the scriptures, in the Froben Plato the substitution of Platonic idealism for the scholastic philosophy based on Aristotle, in the Nuremberg book the epitome of mediaeval superstition, credulity, and curiosity on the verge of the new era, and in Morte d'Arthur the fond return of the modern mind, facing an unknown future, upon the naive and beautiful legends of Arthurian romance. An age full of ...
— Printing and the Renaissance - A paper read before the Fortnightly Club of Rochester, New York • John Rothwell Slater
... indifferent and the sceptical call their exposure 'results.' Depend on it we don't half investigate subjects now-a-days, and we suffer for it by giving place and opportunity for the development of a certain class of beings who prey on our credulity, and make profit out of our ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... severe. The people of Liemba village having a cow or two, and some sheep and goats, eagerly advised us to go on to the next village, as being just behind a hill, and well provisioned. Four very rough hills were the penalty of our credulity, taking four hours of incessant toil in these mountain fastnesses. They hide their food, and the paths are the most difficult that can be found, in order to wear out their enemies. To-day we got to the River Luazi, having ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... Office, but if there is one thing which he dislikes more than anything else, 'tis the idea of being pigeonholed by the Committee on Commerce. The uses to which valuable information is put by that august body of traffickers in public credulity, are not for us. That we might penetrate their benighted minds with many rays of knowledge is not to be doubted, but that we should be snubbed in proportion to the value of our opinions is also equally clear. There are some pretty dark places in this world: the Black Hole of Calcutta; ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 11, June 11, 1870 • Various
... week spent her time in going about to balls, theatres, and operas." On the other hand, the London quidnuncs make my seclusion a matter of wonder, and devise twenty romantic fictions to account for it. Formerly I used to listen to report with interest and a certain credulity; I am now grown deaf and sceptical. Experience has taught me how absolutely devoid of ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... described in Paris as a "terrestrial paradise"; and the "paternal providence of Versailles" willingly yielded place to the monumental speculation of the great financier Antoine Crozat. In this Paris of prolific promotion and amazed credulity, ripe for the colossal scheme of Law, soon to blow to bursting-point the bubble of the Mississippi, the very songs in the street echoed flamboyant, half-satiric panegyrics upon the new Utopia, this Mississippi Land ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... reason and common-sense are gifts of God and intended for use, surely it is very strange to silence them in your search for the supreme truth. Faith, of course, has its place, but it must not be blind faith. Reason must test, verify, and interpret, or faith is mere credulity. ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... were making some foolish joke. Directly he saw she was serious, however, his rage and mortification were indescribable. Here was this young man, not content with hanging about the girl so that neighbors talked, but actually imposing on her credulity, and making a jest of that engaged ring which ought to have been sacred to her. Mr. Roscorla at once saw through the whole affair—the trip to Plymouth, the purchasing of a gypsy-ring that could have been matched a dozen times over anywhere, the return to Penzance ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... early boat left next morning, driven by undefined anxieties towards Madame Clementine's alley. There is a childish credulity which clings to imaginative people through life. I had accepted the blue man and the woman with floating hair in the way which they chose to present themselves. But I began to feel like one who sees a distinctly focused picture shimmering to a dissolving view. The intrusion of an accident ...
— The Blue Man - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... presently take this fan home with which to fan some sick person, and from this process would hope for miraculous intervention in behalf of the suffering one. "And do you believe there is any efficacy in such a proceeding?" we asked. "You would call it the result of credulity and imagination," was his intelligent reply, "but I have seen some wonderful cures brought about after this manner. Do not people, who call themselves Christians, believe in prayer?" "Most certainly," we replied. "Well," continued the guide, "this is simply Chinese prayer." After this explanation, ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... to tell benighted man what to think in any of a thousand questions which arose to confound him. There were, instead, impostors, magicians, vain theorists, prompted by ambition and superior native ability to abuse the credulity of their fellow-mortals, which they did with such success as to become their oracles, their dictators, or even their gods. The multitude most naturally surrendered themselves to all such delusions. If it may be conceived to have been possible that their feeble and degraded reason, in the absence ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... Lamb said of him that from boyhood he had 'hungered for eternity'. Henceforth those are the two notes of his life. From this time we must look for no more true literary talent in him. His style becomes greyer and greyer, his thoughts outre, exaggerated, a kind of credulity or superstition exercised upon abstract words. Like Clifford, in Hawthorne's beautiful romance—the born Epicurean, who by some strange wrong has passed the best of his days in a prison—he is the victim of a division of the will, often showing itself in trivial ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... and spiritual assent. They do not object to creeds. They know that a creed is but a statement, a statement of a man's or a woman's belief, whether it be in connection with religion, or in connection with anything else. But what they do object to is dogma, that unholy thing that lives on credulity, that is therefore destructive of the intellectual and the moral life of every man and every woman who allows it to lay its paralysing hand upon them, that can be held to if one is at all honest and given to thought, only through ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... English, scholar; and by the time I was ten or eleven years of age, I was a critic in substantives, verbs, and particles. In my infant and boyish days, too, I owed much to an old woman who resided in the family, remarkable for her ignorance, credulity, and superstition. She had, I suppose, the largest collection in the country of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... when the play is over, when the thirty years' panorama has been withdrawn in tatters from the stage of the world, we may ask what has become of these great, weighty, and undying loves and the sweethearts who despised mortal conditions in a fine credulity; and they can only show us a few songs in a bygone taste, a few actions worth remembering, and a few children who have retained some happy stamp from ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ship; his imagination plays round the sails, sees her struggles with the sea and the wind in the adventurous journey which does not always end in port; when in addition to the ordinary incidents of departure there are extraordinary ones, even minds little given to credulity let their imagination ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... from the circumstance of his uncle by his mother's side, having been my particular friend. His (that's Tom's uncle's) fate was a melancholy one. Gas was the death of him. When it was first talked of, he laughed. He wasn't angry; he laughed at the credulity of human nature. "They might as well talk," he says, "of laying on an everlasting succession of glow-worms;" and then he laughed again, partly at his joke, and partly ...
— The Lamplighter • Charles Dickens
... in the black shade of his cedar-tree, rooted to the ground by this revelation of male villany and female credulity. ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... protests strongly against such injustice, saying that, however dissipated his college and university life might have been during the two or three years previous to his first travels, no foundation exists, except in the imagination of the poet, and the credulity or malice of the world, for such disgraceful scenes as were represented to have taken place at Newstead, by way of inferences drawn from "Childe Harold." "In this poem," adds Moore, "he describes the habitation of his hero as a ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... refused to be of those who would perpetuate an imposition upon the credulity of his countrymen, and especially of those who had trusted him and had looked up to him as a leader of men, and as an exponent of sound principles of government and public policy. And he refused the more when that imposition was practised for the benefit of those in whom he had ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... Even death did not end his misfortunes. The copies of the first edition having been sold by a graceless descendant to a Leipsic bookseller, a second edition was brought out under a new title, and this, too, is now much sought as a precious memorial of human credulity.(140) ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... vaguely. "And what you tell me of the sparrows in the Hesperides is very novel and impressive—unless, indeed, it is a mere traveller's tale, with which you are seeking to practise upon my credulity. But since I find you in this communicative vein, will you not push complaisance a half-inch further, and tell me what that thing is, suspended there in the sky above the crest of the Cornobastone—that pale round thing, that looks like the ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... was I to be serviceable to a being that was invisible, that was mortal no longer? "Maybe at the moment the Lord will put it into our heads." This is very old-fashioned phraseology, and a week before, most likely, I should have smiled (though always with kindness) at Dr. Moncrieff's credulity; but there was a great comfort, whether rational or otherwise I cannot say, in the ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... evidence that may be laid before you. In fulfilling this sacred duty, you will, I feel assured, be governed exclusively by a stern regard to the demands of public justice. While it taxes our reluctant credulity to believe that a crime so hideous could have been committed by a woman's hand, could have been perpetrated without provocation, within the borders of our peaceful community, nevertheless, the evidence we shall adduce must inevitably ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... Nothing could seem impossible, after all that they had seen. . . . They acted in good faith. A woman said to them, "I am Jeanne, your sister." They believed, because they wished to believe.' And so forth, about the credulity ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... old wives' stories there was one which I was inclined to hear with more credulity. As I was told, in that tempest which scattered the ships of the Invincible Armada over all the north and west of Scotland, one great vessel came ashore on Aros, and before the eyes of some solitary people on a hill-top, went down in a moment with all hands, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... honoured by him with a private interview of a quarter of an hour, were enviable distinctions. He, after the fashion of all the false prophets who have deluded themselves and others, drew new faith in his own lie from the credulity of his disciples. His countenance, his voice, his gestures, indicated boundless self-importance. When he appeared in public he looked,—such is the language of one who probably had often seen him,—like Atlas conscious ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Then dead atoms set dead atoms into motion and produced life! Can you believe this? If you can, you need find no trouble in believing in the most orthodox hell. Can you get more out of a thing than there is in it? We don't think so. But we do think that there is credulity enough, even blind credulity, in the advocates of spontaneous generation to enable them to believe anything they may happen to wish true. We are told that "life in its higher forms is not an immaterial entity, nor the result ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... mountain has tended to make the inhabitants of its immediate zone the slaves of superstitious awe, the disasters of generations have likewise imbued them with a spirit of fatalism, that appears even stronger than their outward show of credulity. Life is not so sweet nor so dear apparently to these children of the South, but that they can afford to take their chance of disturbance or death with a true philosophic calm. The fisher-folk and maccaroni workers of Resina, Portici and the two Torres ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... one hand, it has been declared that the monks forged the retractation. and procured its insertion among the works of the man who had done so much to expose their abuses and ignorance, and to weaken their hold on popular credulity: on the other hand, Chaucer himself at the close of his life, is said to have greatly lamented the ribaldry and the attacks on the clergy which marked especially "The Canterbury Tales," and to have drawn up a formal retractation of which the "Prayer" is either a copy or an abridgment. ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... Cowper epousa deux femmes, qui vecurent ensemble dans sa maison avec une concorde singuliere qui fit honneur a tous trois. Plusieurs curieux ont encore le petit livre que ce Chancelier composa en faveur de la Polygamie." Tickled by the extravagant credulity or grotesque malice of this declaration, an English wit, improving upon the published words, represented the Frenchman as maintaining that the custodian of the Great Seal of England was called the Lord Keeper, because, ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... is often, and perhaps Almost invariably, quite justified. To be the wife of an ordinary man, indeed, is an experience that must be very hard to bear. The hollowness and vanity of the fellow, his petty meanness and stupidity, his puling sentimentality and credulity, his bombastic air of a cock on a dunghill, his anaesthesia to all whispers and summonings of the spirit, above all, his loathsome clumsiness in amour—all these things must revolt any woman above the lowest. To be the object of the oafish affections ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... was to her schemes to insure the daughter's co-operation. Conscious of the eagerness of Maria Theresa for the recovery of the rich province which Frederick the Great of Prussia had wrested from her ancient dominions, he pressed upon her credulity the assurance that the influence of which the Dauphine was capable over Louis XV., by the youthful beauty's charms acting upon the dotard's admiration, would readily induce that monarch to give such ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 3 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... resolved itself into a series of events which, though surprising enough, could not by any stretch of the credulity be called supernatural. ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... thought the best plan was to destroy them.' 'You acted wisely,' observed Antonio; 'by the saints! it was a good thought of mine to introduce you to my mother's lodger as a trustworthy messenger! If he only knew that we had shared his gold, and were laughing at him for his credulity, he would not be over well pleased. His purse appears to be pretty well lined, and when we have got all our present business off our hands we will devote our attention to the lodger. The Arno is deep and a foreigner the less ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... his superstitions, his credulity and mistakes; Plato, with all his blunders in elementary logic; Homer, with all his naive ignorance of science and the wide world; Dante, despite his cramped outlook; Milton, in spite of his perverse theologizing—these and their like are, and will always be, literature. ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker |
