"Materialist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... your nature,—no! You have made your body like a transparent scabbard through which the glitter of the soul-sword is almost visible. But I am different. I am so much of a materialist that I like to pull down Heaven to the warm bosom of Earth and make them mingle. You would lift up Earth to Heaven! Ah, that is difficult! Even Christ came down! It is the chief thing I admire in Him, that He 'descended from Heaven and was made ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... dining in company with a French gentleman, who had been before dinner indulging in a number of free-thinking speculations, and had ended by avowing himself a materialist. "Very good soup, this," said Mr. Smith. "Oui, monsieur, c'est excellente," was the reply. "Pray, sir, do you believe in ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... he managed at the same time to point out where, when, and how his mind had gone astray. He made his nephew think himself finer than he was by judicious praise, yet more foolish than he was by minimizing the value of the evidence. Like many another materialist, that is, he lied cleverly on the basis of insufficient knowledge, because the knowledge supplied seemed to his own ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... by no means easy and, as Mr. Hanna once remarked, "Yuen-nan Province has broken the heart of more than one missionary." The Chinese do not understand their point of view, and it is difficult to make them see it. A Chinaman is a rank materialist and pure altruism does not enter into his scheme of life. As a rule he has but two thoughts, his stomach and his cash bag. It is well-nigh impossible to make him realize that the missionary has not come with an ulterior motive—if ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... the unity of apperception in thought cannot allow him to believe it a composite being, instead of declaring, as he ought to do, that he is unable to explain the possibility of a thinking nature; what ought to hinder the materialist, with as complete an independence of experience, to employ the principle of the rationalist in a directly opposite manner— still preserving the formal unity required by ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... philosophy." Admitting that to every state of consciousness, to every minutest transition in our thoughts, there corresponds a cerebral change, it is yet nothing less than a childish blunder to confound correspondence with causality. The materialist has positively no good ground for stating that cerebral changes are the causes of the mental states corresponding to them; indeed, the contrary proposition is far more inherently probable, since it is spirit, and not matter, that "possesses the power ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... and that for many reasons. Like almost all medical men he is a sceptic and a materialist, but, at the same time, he is a genuine poet—a poet always in deeds and often in words, although he has never written two verses in his life. He has mastered all the living chords of the human heart, just ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov |
