"Omniscience" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... most necessary of all, the knowledge of human nature, is hardly if at all considered by them. The true rules of composition, which are very few, are not to be found in their voluminous systems. Their pretentiousness, their omniscience, their large fortunes, their impatience of argument, their indifference to first principles, their stupidity, their progresses through Hellas accompanied by a troop of their disciples—these things were very distasteful to Plato, who esteemed genius far above art, ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... certainly was a full believer in the religion of Jesus Christ; and earnestly advocated the support and extension of that religion. God makes great allowance for the frailties of his fallen children. It requires the wisdom of omniscience to decide how much wickedness there may be in the heart, consistently with piety. No man ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... his power under a supreme monarch. 'I do not,' retorts Waterland, 'dispute against the notion of one king under another; what I insist upon is that a great king and a little king make two kings; (consequently a supreme God and an inferior God make two Gods).' Dr. Clarke did not altogether deny omniscience to be an attribute of Christ, but he affirmed it to be a relative omniscience, communicated to him from the Father. 'That is, in plain language,' retorted Waterland, 'the Son knows all things, except that He is ignorant of many things.' Dr. Clarke did not altogether deny the eternity ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... one time, I did think Rupert and Grace had a preference for each other; but I must have been deceived. God had ordered it otherwise, and wisely no doubt; as his omniscience foresaw the early drooping of this lovely flower. I suppose their having been educated together, so much like brother and sister, has been the reason there was so much indifference to each other's merits. You have been an ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... Zechariah 3:9, we read of the symbol of a stone laid before Joshua, that on it were engraved "seven eyes," which "are the eyes of the Lord which run to and fro, through the whole earth," (Zech. 4:10);—an expressive figure of God's Omniscience. The same is symbolized in Rev. 5:6, by the ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... would no doubt have opened differently, and with another beginning the whole would have been different; but whether it would then have interested the world after a hundred years, as that of the real Schiller does, is a question for omniscience. Speaking humanly one can only say that the misguided paternalism of Karl Eugen in rousing the tiger proved a blessing in disguise. And the schooling itself was by no means so despicable. Schiller left the academy a good Latinist, though with but little Greek. He had learned to read French, if ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... conveying a falsehood with the heart only, without making the tongue guilty of an untruth, by the means of equivocation and imposture, hath quieted the conscience of many a notable deceiver; and yet, when we consider that it is Omniscience on which these endeavour to impose, it may possibly seem capable of affording only a very superficial comfort; and that this artful and refined distinction between communicating a lie, and telling one, is hardly worth ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... undoubtedly encouraged. More than Spenser or Milton or the old ballads, he was the inspiration and guide for new endeavors in literature. It seemed to the new age of critics and poets that they had rediscovered him, and they hastened to raise him from neglect to the throne of omniscience. He was no longer a wayward genius, he was the model from whom art and ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... baseless, but impertinent. Without stepping beyond the analogy of that which is known, it is easy to people the cosmos with entities, in ascending scale, until we reach something practically indistinguishable from omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience. If our intelligence can, in some matters, surely reproduce the past of thousands of years ago and anticipate the future, thousands of years hence, it is clearly within the limits of possibility that some greater intellect, even of the same order, may be able to mirror the whole past ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... think now of Lannes. Would he come? Was Weber right when he credited to him a knowledge near to omniscience? How was it possible for him to pick out a friend in all that huge morass of battle! And yet he had a wonderful, almost an unreasoning faith in Philip, and, as always when he thought of him, he looked up ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... she now denied? Doubtless helping to account for this lack of tact was the idea that he should thus justify himself for so far presuming just now. Not, of course, that there is really any excuse for a young man's forgetting that ladies have one advantage over Omniscience, in that not only are they privileged to remember what they please, but also to ignore what they see fit ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... monopoly and the superstitious, hopeless complacency of the public, the writer says: "The assumption is that the 'registered doctor' or surgeon knows everything that is known, and can do everything that is to be done. This means that the dogmas of omniscience, omnipotence and infallibility, and something very like the theory of the apostolic succession and kingship by anointment, have recovered in medicine the grip they have lost in theology and politics. This would not matter ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... sums up the whole duty and the whole destiny of man: 'And now abideth Faith, Hope, and Charity,—these three.' If Faith, Hope, and Charity abide, then Humanity abides. Faith is for beings without the certainty of omniscience. Hope is for beings without the strength of omnipotence. And Charity, as the apostle describes it, affects the relations of beings limited and imperfect to ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... sick, I assure you," declared his nephew, "positively dizzy!" His uncle's attitude of calm omniscience, merely because he knew more psychological formulae, made him slightly defiant. It was so easy to be wise in the explanation of an experience one has not personally witnessed. "A kind of desolate and terrible odor is the only way I can describe it," he concluded, glancing ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... this appeal, and the author's contribution to the eternal problem of evil, are found in xxxviii. I to xlii. 6. It is not a solution, but through the wonders of the natural world, it is a fuller revelation to the mind of Job, of the omnipotence, the omniscience, the wisdom, and the goodness of God. Even though he cannot discern the reason of his own suffering, he learns to know and to trust the wisdom and love ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... great deal too glibly as to what they know very little about, the interaction of the divine and the human elements in Christ, and on the one side are far too certain in their affirmation that His humanity possessed in some reflected fashion the divine gift of omniscience; and on the other hand, that His manhood, passing through the process of human development, and increasing in wisdom, was necessarily in its earlier stages void of the consciousness of His Messianic mission. I dare not affirm either 'yes' or 'no' about that matter; ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... thinks of it," said Miriam, with a thoughtful smile. "At least, she might conclude that sin—which man chose instead of good—has been so beneficently handled by omniscience and omnipotence, that, whereas our dark enemy sought to destroy us by it, it has really become an instrument most effective in the education ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... people: perhaps he called her Cissie. Strzezislava is certainly too rich for ordinary household use. Cosmas passes by this point in silence, which is a pity; it is just those intimate little touches that foster pleasant social relations and justify the chronicler's attitude of omniscience; our illustrated Press has reached perfection in that line. Mnata and Strzezislava flit across the stage and pass into oblivion without the benefit of gramophone and cinema. Then emerges one Bo[vr]ivoj, first of that name, who stands out ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... and anon, In momentary rapture, great with small, Omniscience with intelligency, God With man—the thunder glow from pole to pole Abolishing, a blissful moment-space, Great cloud alike and small cloud, in one fire— As sure to ebb as sure again to flow When the new receptivity deserves ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... qualities approaching the preternatural. The vivid and fertile imagination of the literary romancist magnifies the illusion. The detective of the successful novel resembles the Deity in his attributes of ubiquity and omniscience. In whatever city his functions are exercised we may be sure that he knows every man-Jack of the criminal classes, their past and present history, their occupation and their residence. He knows all their names, their aliases ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... Verrall and Butcher. It may be remarked in passing that these and other examples show clearly either that the spirits have the use of an excellent reference library or else that they have memories which produce something like omniscience. No human memory could possibly carry all the exact quotations which occur in such communications as The Ear ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle
... cramped in the constitutional restrictions. If he could have been Grand Llama of the United States, that might have come the nearest to his idea of a position. And next to that he would have luxuriated in the irresponsible omniscience of the ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... monument under a new angle of sight, the golden and silver faces of the same heraldic shield. The very same act which denies the right of interpretation to a mysterious Papal phoenix, renewed from generation to generation, having the antiquity and the incomprehensible omniscience of the Simorg in Southey, transferred this right of mere necessity to the individuals of the whole human race. For where else could it have been lodged? Any attempt in any other direction was but to ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... present, and forevermore. The universe, cleft to the core, Lay open to my probing sense That, sick'ning, I would fain pluck thence But could not, — nay! But needs must suck At the great wound, and could not pluck My lips away till I had drawn All venom out. — Ah, fearful pawn! For my omniscience paid I toll In infinite remorse of soul. All sin was of my sinning, all Atoning mine, and mine the gall Of all regret. Mine was the weight Of every brooded wrong, the hate That stood behind each envious thrust, Mine ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... asserts that Jesus lacked supreme intelligence, the natural question is, "How do you know that you are right in your appraisal, 'lest haply ye be found even to fight against God'?" The answer is that we do not claim omniscience, but merely request everyone to use his or her own judgment, with intellectual honesty, examining each act or saying of Jesus without regard to ...
— The Mistakes of Jesus • William Floyd
... affirmed that the doctrines which they advocated were going forth conquering and to conquer; and though I may still think that those doctrines had a permanent value, and were far from deserving the reproaches now often levelled at them, I must admit that we greatly exaggerated our omniscience. I am often tempted, I confess, to draw the rather melancholy moral that some of my younger friends may be destined to disillusionment, and may be driven some thirty years hence to admit that their present confidence ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... supineness on the other, their numbers accumulated by intriguing and discontented foreigners under proscription, who were at war with their own government, and the greater part of them with all governments, they will increase, and nothing short of omniscience can foretell ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... not content to see that sacred head divided from the body, your piercing malice enters into the private agonies of his struggling soul, with a blasphemous insolence invading the prerogative of God himself (omniscience), and by deductions most unchristian and illogical aspersing his last pieties (the almost certain inspirations of the Holy Spirit) with juggle and prevarication. Nor are the words ill-fitted to the matter, the bold design being suited with a conform irreverence of ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... by a gulf which could only have been bridged over by the long and painful study of a man surviving for centuries. His scientific knowledge was superficial in nearly every branch. It was his divination which was great. And divination is not omniscience. ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... Washington very shortly. Tankard had himself been at Washington, and also before that at Lisbon, and could tell Mrs. Hopkins how utterly unimportant had been the actual ministers at those places, and how the welfare of England had depended altogether on the discretion and general omniscience of his young master,—and of himself. He, Tankard, had been the only person in Washington who had really known in what order Americans should go out to dinner one after another. Mr. Elias Gotobed, who was coming, was perhaps the most distinguished American ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... interest had given place to one impersonal, although sincere in its way. What was the explanation of this? He had enshrined her, set her upon a fairy pedestal, only to learn that she was humanly frail. Had this discovery hurt him? Intensely. How and why? It had shattered his belief in his omniscience. Yes, that was the unpalatable truth, brought to light at last. Frailty in woman he looked for, and because he knew it to be an offshoot of that Eternal Feminine which is a root-principle of the universe, he condoned. But in Flamby he had seemed to recognise a rare spirit, one ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... greater part of his conversation took the form of question and answer, and his thirst for information was as marked as his belief that German should not simply be spoken but spoken "out loud." He invariably prefaced his inquiries with the word "Please," and he insisted upon ascribing an omniscience to his employer that it was extremely irksome to justify after a strenuous morning of enthusiastic literary effort. He now took the opportunity of a lull in the solicitudes and congratulations that ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... some barbaric and repulsive, but all of little worth. The wise man, the true philosopher, will not mistake the machinery of a religion for the religious idea, the garment which ignorance weaves for Omniscience, ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... did in truth write a tale of the famine, after that it would behove the author to write a tale of the pestilence; and then another, a tale of the exodus. These three wonderful events, following each other, were the blessings coming from Omniscience and Omnipotence by which the black clouds were driven from the Irish firmament. If one through it all could have dared to hope, and have had from the first that wisdom which has learned to acknowledge that His mercy endureth for ever! And then the same author ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... country have made capital." (Note 34). So that the greatest error in the criminal legislation of all countries forms part of the divine providence, and man has at length discovered, by the light of reason, the folly and the wickedness of using an instrument expressly created by divine Omniscience to ...
— The Fallen Star; and, A Dissertation on the Origin of Evil • E. L. Bulwer; and, Lord Brougham
... from our ignorance, as from our dogmatism. We assert the dogma, or at least we quietly assume the dogma, that there are no spiritual or intellectual beings between ourselves and God; or, if we shrink from an assertion which so nearly implies our own omniscience, we lay down that these superior beings, of whose laws we know nothing, can only act upon us in ways precisely similar to those on which ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler
... few days, and could only exchange a passionate letter or two with her. For some time the examination fever had been raging, and in every college poor patients sat with wet towels round their heads. Some, who had neglected their tutor all the term, now strove to absorb his omniscience in a sitting. ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... expanded faculties; and what to our present senses may seem irreconcilable to our limited notions of mercy, of justice, and of love, shall stand irradiated by the light of truth, confessedly the suggestions of Omniscience, and the acts of ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... allusion, answered her question in these terms: "This honest world will forgive a young gamester for indiscretion at play, but a favour granted to a babbling coxcomb is an unpardonable offence." This response she received with equal astonishment and chagrin; and, fully convinced of the necromancer's omniscience, implored his advice, touching the retrieval of her reputation: upon which he counselled her to wed with the first opportunity. She seemed so well pleased with his admonition, that she gratified him with a double fee, and, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... unhallowed criticism of human Reason." (p. 110.) We do not, by any means, "treat all objections as profane, and discard exceptions unanswered as shocking and immoral." (p. 100.) Neither does the Church think herself "omniscient and infallible;" (p. 96;) though she holds Omniscience to be an attribute of GOD; and Infallibility, of the Bible. But she deprecates in the strongest manner vague insinuations and unsupported doubts of the reality of her LORD'S Miracles, sown broad-cast over the land; and she is at a loss to understand ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... Being for the coming of his Kingdom, being solicitous for no other temporal Blessings but our daily Sustenance. On the other side, We pray against nothing but Sin, and against Evil in general, leaving it with Omniscience to determine what is really such. If we look into the first of Socrates his Rules of Prayer, in which he recommends the above-mentioned Form of the ancient Poet, we find that Form not only comprehended, ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... Abbott's ingenious method of interpretation, and taken this precaution against him. And this was a great surprise to me—for, truly, I had not supposed it possible that such an interpretation could have been foreseen, even by Omniscience itself. I will conclude this communication by venturing the assertion that it could not have been foreseen by any other person or thing, in the heavens above, on the earth beneath, or the waters under the earth. Dr. Abbott may accept my congratulations upon having achieved the most ingenious ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... unbidden guests divine my very thoughts!' thought Swanhilda. 'Upon my life, it looks as if a spice of omniscience had really crept under ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... increased the confidence with which each man backed his opinion. Sir Robert Perry alone knew nothing, had heard nothing, and would guess nothing—by which adroit attitude he doubled his reputation for omniscience. And Mr. Kilshaw alone cared nothing: the Ministry was "cornered," he said, and that was enough for him. Eleanor Scaife was insatiable for information, or, failing that, conjecture, and she eagerly questioned the throng of men who came and went, paying ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... looked wearily through the ages, and died rejoicing even to see afar off the glimmer of His day. The name of Jesus tells of the child born in Bethlehem, who knows the experience of our lives by His own, and not only bends over our griefs with the pity and omniscience of a God, but with the experience and sympathy of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... in the maternal omniscience seemed to have received a shock. He had the air of a seeker after truth who has been baffled. His eyes ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... various attributes, the quality of which we also find applicable to creatures, only that in Him they are raised to the highest degree, e.g., power, knowledge, presence, goodness, etc., under the designations of omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, etc., there are three that are ascribed to God exclusively, and yet without the addition of greatness, and which are all moral He is the only holy, the only blessed, the only wise, because these conceptions already imply the absence of limitation. ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... course, are tremendously clever and accomplished persons and children are no match for them; but still, with all their talents and omniscience and power, adults seem to lack important pieces of knowledge which children possess; they seem to forget, and to fail to profit by, their infantile experience. Else why should adults in general be so extraordinarily ignorant of the great truth that the secret of goodwill lies ...
— The Feast of St. Friend • Arnold Bennett
... to him. This oration is graceful and strong, and possesses sufficient and appropriate eloquence. It is chiefly interesting, however, from the reserve and self-control, dictated by a nice sense of fitness, which it exhibited. Omniscience was not Mr. Webster's foible. He never was guilty of Lord Brougham's weakness of seeking to prove himself master of universal knowledge. In delivering an address on science and invention, there was a strong temptation to an orator like Mr. Webster to substitute glittering rhetoric ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... would give his life for the life he took at any moment. But you cannot recreate one life by destroying another. There is no human means of ascertaining justice, but we can always do mercy with divine omniscience." As he spoke the sun pierced the edge of the eastern horizon, and lit up the marble walls and roofs of the Regionic ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... Teacher. 'He,' not 'it,' He, is the Spirit of truth whose characteristic and weapon is truth. 'He will guide you'— suggesting a loving hand put out to lead; suggesting the graciousness, the gentleness, the gradualness of the teaching. 'Into all truth '—that is no promise of omniscience, but it is the assurance of gradual and growing acquaintance with the spiritual and moral truth which is revealed, such as may be fitly paralleled by the metaphor of men passing into some broad land, of which there is much still to be possessed and explored. Not to-day, nor ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... depicted on Nicholas's face. The examining magistrate's omniscience startled him. But soon his expression of astonishment changed to extreme indignation. He began to cry and requested permission to go and wash his face and quiet ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... that there was no possible way for them to avert their doom. And though He loved each of them with an infinite love, He made no way of escape, but consigned them to eternal torment. Foreseeing in His omniscience that all this would happen, He did not intercept their coming, which He could easily have done; nor did He ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... forth from amid the wintry sky, Austerlitz, commencing with the capture of the plateau of Pratzen and ending with the frightful catastrophe on the frozen lake, where an entire Russian corps, men, guns, horses, went crashing through the ice, while Napoleon, who in his divine omniscience had foreseen it all, of course, directed his artillery to play upon the struggling mass. There was Jena, where so many of Prussia's bravest found a grave; at first the red flames of musketry flashing through the ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... he still hoped, notwithstanding present difficulties and frequent former failures, to add them to his harem; and partly because he was under the apprehension that, among their other attributes, his mysterious visitors might possess that of omniscience, and, getting knowledge of the execution, object to and call him to account for it. It was a similar consideration alone which deterred him from solacing himself by the impalement of half a dozen or so of his principal ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... the woman with the issue of blood, Jesus turned round, and said, 'Who has touched me?' So, then, He did not know who touched Him? That is opposed to the omniscience of Jesus. If the tomb was watched by guards, the women had not to worry themselves about an assistant to lift up the stone from the tomb. Therefore, there were no guards there—or rather, the holy women were not there at all. At Emmaues, He eats with His disciples, ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... five years was no doubt a very joyous one; but as no accounts have come down to us of Chopin's doings and feelings during his sojourn in the Bohemian watering-place, I shall make no attempt to fill up the gap by a gushing description of what may have been, evolved out of the omniscience of my inner consciousness, although this would be an insignificant feat compared with those of a recent biographer whose imaginativeness enabled her to describe the appearance of the sky and the state of the weather in the night when her hero became a free citizen of this planet, and ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... exceptional claims. The attitude of omniscience and omnipotence has often been crudely stated by the Catholic hierarchy. Archbishop Walsh, of Dublin, has declared that there is no dividing line between religion and politics. Dr. Walsh has also laid down the dictum that, "As priests and independent of all human organisations, we have ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... of their feelings and motives, as well as their most private conversations in various places at once. All this is very amusing, but perfectly unnatural: the merest simpleton could hardly mistake a fiction of this kind for a true history, unless he believed the writer to be endued with omniscience and omnipresence, or to be aided by familiar spirits, doing the office of Homer's Muses, whom he invokes to tell him all that could not ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... Mr. Lowell must certainly be reckoned among the famous talkers of his time. During the years that he represented the United States in London his trim sentences, his airy omniscience, his minute and circumstantial way of laying down literary law, were the inevitable ornaments of serious dinners and cultured tea-tables. My first encounter with Mr. Lowell took place many years before he entered on his diplomatic career. It was in 1872, when I chanced to meet him in a company ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... seemed divided in his allegiance. Then he decided for what he believed quite firmly to be omniscience. 'But old Broomie,' he said, 'he told all the boys in his class only yesterday, "no man will ever fly." No one, he says, who has ever shot grouse or pheasants on the wing would ever ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... Michelangelo, probably will require to be pried loose from him, so incessantly has he worn them within the memory of man. None has ever looked upon him in the open air without his cane. And is not that emblem of omniscience and authority, the schoolmaster's ferule, directly of the cane family? So large has the cane loomed in the matter of chastisement that the word cane has become ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... Omniscience we may not, in our finite intelligence, fully cognize, because full cognition would preclude the ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... speaking rather slowly, "Talk of cheek! Do you know what you're accusing me of? You and your precious taste! Leslie and your other fool patrons seem to have given you a fair opinion of yourself. Because you, in your omniscience, think a thing bad, which I ... which I obviously consider good, and have stated so in print ... you don't so much as deign to argue the question, but get upon your pedestal and ask me why I tell lies. You think one thing and I think another; of course, you must know best, but I presume I may be ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... the mountains and is girded with power," Whose servants the glaciers, the snow, and the ice are, "wind and storm fulfilling His Word"; who exult in the exercise of their own intelligences and the playthings those intelligences have constructed and yet deny the Omniscience that endowed them with some minute fragment of Itself! It was not always so; it was not so with the really great men who have advanced our knowledge of nature. But of late years hordes of small men have given themselves up to the ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... since she could declare her allegiance to her former employer unimpaired. Thereby was she at liberty to join in the local condemnation of Reginald Sawyer and his sermon. She did so with an assumption of elegant, if slightly hysterical, omniscience. This was not without its practical side. She regretted her inability to meet him at meals. In consequence the Miss Minetts proposed he should be served in his own sitting-room, until such time as it suited him to find another place of residence than ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... hiding-place. Very soon he reached the edge of the shrubbery, and gazed keenly into the moonlit, park-like meadow below him. Peer as he might, he could see no trace of Warde. A dozen trees might conceal him. Perhaps with the omniscience of the house-master, he had divined that the wicket-gate was the ultimate place of egress. Perhaps the wicket had been used for a similar purpose when Warde himself was a boy at the Manor. It was vital to John's plan that Warde should ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... sublimest ideal of Omniscience, first-born of God, fairest and loftiest Seraph of the celestial hierarchy, Muse of the beautiful, ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... every gasp? Ah, remember that Matter and the Soul are not alone! Far above that clay bound, struggling soul, and far above those measureless, firmamental masses, is God, the Maker of them both, and the Lover of his child. Glancing in His omniscience down upon that human death couch, around which affectionate prayers are floating from every part of the earth, and from whose pallid occupant confiding sighs are rising to His ear, He sees the unutterable mysteries of yearning thought, emotion, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... just about decided to throw Greenwich Village omniscience overboard and admit privately to himself that people like Peter can be both human and interesting even if they do live in the East Sixties instead of Macdougal Alley when a page comes in discreetly for Johnny Chipman. ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... let a woman have that much consolation?" she said, lifting her gray eyes to his with a little laugh. "Do you insist on being the only and perfect embodiment of omniscience?" ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... doing well, and a time when routine has largely replaced the stimulus of novelty. The Great State will, I feel convinced, regard changes in occupation as a proper circumstance in the life of every citizen; it will value a certain amateurishness in its service, and prefer it to the trite omniscience of the stale official. On that score of the necessity or versatility, if on no other score, I am flatly antagonistic to the conceptions of "Guild Socialism" which have arisen recently out of the impact of Mr. Penty and Syndicalism upon the uneasy intelligence ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... hand. The more we wrote the wiser we became; the opinions of one day were rejected the next; the blind surmising of yesterday ripened into the full knowledge of to-day, and this matured into the superhuman omniscience of this evening. We have finally got so infernally clever that we have abandoned the original design of our great work, and determined to make it a compendium of everything that is accurately known up to date, and the bearing of this upon ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... Endued with great energy, he then, having reflected, said these words: 'Without doubt, O Suta's son, it is Time that destroyeth the universe. And it is Time that again createth everything. Nothing here is eternal. It is Nara and Narayana, endued with omniscience, that destroyeth all creatures.[57] The gods speak of him as Vaikuntha (of immeasurable puissance), while men call him Vishnu (one that ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... that lie contiguous to them. Their knowledge and observation turn within a very narrow circle. But as God Almighty cannot but perceive and know everything in which he resides, infinite space gives room to infinite knowledge, and is, as it were, an organ to Omniscience.' Addison, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... discovered that this effigy meant a cow, then she cried out, "tee dee moomo!" with a joy which afforded me more satisfaction than any acceptance of a story on the part of an editor had ever conveyed. Each scrawl was to her a fresh revelation of the omniscience, the magic of her father—therefore I drew and drew while her recreant mother sat on the other side of the fire and watched us, a wicked smile ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... turn. "You have indeed a curious knowledge," he says. A foible of Mr. Holt's, who did know more about books and men than, perhaps, almost any person Esmond had ever met, was omniscience; thus in every point he here professed to know, he was nearly right, but not quite. Esmond's wound was in the right side, not the left, his first general was General Lumley; Mr. Webb came out of Wiltshire, not out of Yorkshire; and so forth. Esmond did ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... teaching of its lumber, and taken out a new lease of life both for it and for themselves. An infallible pope and an infallible council might have done something in this way, if good sense had been among the attributes of their omniscience. What they did do was something very different. It was as if, when the new astronomy began to be taught, the professors of that science in all the universities of Europe had met together and decided that Ptolemy's cycles and epicycles were eternal ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... I think humanly spoken. It is a natural thought, a sweet fallacy to the Survivors—but still a fallacy. If it stands on the doctrine of this being a probationary state, it is liable to this dilemma. Omniscience, to whom possibility must be clear as act, must know of the child, what it would hereafter turn out: if good, then the topic is false to say it is secured from falling into future wilfulness, vice, &c. If bad, I do not see how its exemption from certain future overt ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... on the brink of a flippant claim of omniscience, but realizing in time the agony she must be suffering he checked ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... in this way by the omniscience of all who work on it so that, when it is finally produced, the writer seldom recognizes more than a glimmer of his original idea in the ...
— Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence - The Queer Old Man of the Thousand Islands • Alice B. Emerson
... produces an impure action, and the love of virtue itself sometimes occasions our removal from it; but in the present case the action is aggravated by the motive. Pride, vain-glory, perhaps the desire of robbing God of his pre-eminence, his omniscience, or his jurisdiction over the creature, his most sacred and incommunicable distinctions, were the ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... the Johnnies I mean. You go up to them and say: "When's the next train for Melonsquashville, Tennessee?" and they reply, without stopping to think, "Two-forty-three, track ten, change at San Francisco." And they're right every time. Well, Jeeves gives you just the same impression of omniscience. ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... of omniscience bores me. Apart from your gift you're a very ordinary man, Dick, if you could only be ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... these things only to smile at them; far be it from us to insult the reader's understanding by asking him to regard them seriously. But story-tellers labor under one disadvantage which is peculiar to their profession,—the necessity of omniscience. This tends to make them top arbitrary, leads them to disregard the modesty of nature and the harmonies of reason in their methods. They will pretend to know things which they never could have seen or heard ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... explain nature as it reveals itself to the senses in terms of consciousness. The explanation may be all wrong in the eyes of omniscience. All one can say is that it is a practical working basis, and is good enough for mundane purposes. But if I am asked if I can solve the riddle of the Universe I can only answer, No. Brunetiere then retorts that science is bankrupt. But this is equivocal. It ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... of a confident, sanguine, impetuous nature. He had great common sense, and he saw what he saw quickly and clearly, but he did not see very far below the surface. He wrote with the conviction of an advocate, and the easy omniscience of a man whose learning is really nothing more than "general information," raised to a very high power, rather than with the subtle penetration of an original or truly philosophic intellect, like Coleridge's ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... turned from the face of God because you are angered against one of God's ministers. If any poor words of mine have power to touch your hearts, I beg you to believe that in giving us this great trial of our faith God is acting with that mysterious justice and omniscience of which we speak idly without in the least apprehending what He means. I shall say no more in defence and explanation of the Bishop's action, and if he should consider my defence and explanation of it a piece of presumption I send him at this solemn ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... religious matters. There is nothing like omniscience,—nothing like infinite or absolutely perfect knowledge or infallibility in any man: yet every one may have all the information and all the assurance on things moral and spiritual needful ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... I had expected, in his study at Omniscience Lodge. There he sat in his new suit of Britlings, surrounded by novels and stories in MS. dealing with every aspect of human affairs, sixty of the more important being specifically devoted to the War and the various ways in which it might conceivably ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 25, 1917 • Various
... Peculiars were usually acquitted. The prosecution broke down when the doctor in the witness box was asked whether, if the child had had medical attendance, it would have lived. It was, of course, impossible for any man of sense and honor to assume divine omniscience by answering this in the affirmative, or indeed pretending to be able to answer it at all. And on this the judge had to instruct the jury that they must acquit the prisoner. Thus a judge with a keen ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... and doctrinaire injustices, of his jesting like a Roman Emperor's, of the strength of his happiness upon a journey, of his buckishness, of the queer lack of surprising phrases in his work, of his measured omniscience, of the immense weight of tradition in the manner of his writing. There are many contemporary writers whose work seems to be a development of journalism. Mr. Belloc's is the child of four literatures, or, maybe, half a dozen. He often writes carelessly, sometimes dully ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... said that drowning persons recall, as by a sudden omniscience, all their past lives, as soon as the water closes above them and the first shock of horror is past. It was not so with me. I remembered nothing beyond the events of the past week; but, by some strange action of the mind, as soon as the gasping sense of an unnatural element passed ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... Eugenio, of always breaking new ground. The reviewer, however, is probably much newer than the ground which the established author breaks in his last book, and, coming to it in his generous ignorance, which he has to conceal under a mask of smiling omniscience, he condemns or praises it without reference to the work which has gone before it and which it is merely part of, though of course it has entirety enough of a sort to stand alone. If the author has broken ground in the direction of a new type of heroine, the reviewer, ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... as delicately as he could to Staines. Christopher was deeply grieved and wounded. He thought it unjust, but he knew it was natural: he said, humbly, "I feel guilty myself, Mr. Dale; and yet, unless I had possessed omniscience, what could I do? I thought of her in all—poor thing! ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... than we know. If we will not interfere with our thought, but will act entirely, or see how the thing stands in God, we know the particular thing, and every thing, and every man. For the Maker of all things and all persons stands behind us and casts his dread omniscience through us over things. ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... dark as it was, and unseen as she must have been by any eye but that of Omniscience, between her hands, and groaned. This sudden paroxysm of feeling, however, lasted but for a moment, and she continued more calmly, still speaking frankly to her sister, whose intelligence, and whose discretion ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... respected, and left almost without the necessary support of a miserable existence. Alas, Sir! must I think that such, soon, will be my lot! and from the d—mned, dark insinuations of hellish, groundless envy too! I believe, Sir, I may aver it, and in the sight of Omniscience, that I would not tell a deliberate falsehood, no, not though even worse horrors, if worse can be, than those I have mentioned, hung over my head; and I say, that the allegation, whatever villain has made it, is ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... have carefully thought on these subjects will realise that while the knowledge of a Master is, as regards you or me, practical omniscience, it is by no means omniscience on His own plane, relative to the problems with which He has to deal and which He has to solve. A Master amongst Masters, a Master within the Great White Lodge, He is amongst His peers, in the ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... absorption of the soul in God, or its feeling that it is one with him. But this is certainly not the only explanation of ecstasy given in India, for it is recognized as real and beneficent by Buddhists and Jains. The same rapture, the same sense of omniscience and of ability to comprehend the scheme of things, the same peace and freedom are experienced by both theistic and non-theistic sects, just as they have also been experienced by Christian mystics. The experiences ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... identified with the Idea or Logos which might be the ultimate theme of intelligence. There could be only one mind, so conceived, since there could be only one total system in the universe visible to omniscience. ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... best parliamentary manner, a happy blending of reproach, omniscience and pardon. "Only two months ago," said Mr. Sheridan, "I was so fortunate as to encounter a lady who, alike through the attractions of her person and the sprightliness of her conversation, convinced me I was on the road to fall in love after the ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... a whole country—as did ours—thinking that Washington is a sort of heaven and behind its clouds dwell omniscience and omnipotence, you are educating that country into a dependent state of mind which augurs ill for the future. Our help does not come from Washington, but from ourselves; our help may, however, go to Washington as a sort of central ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... to our correspondent and also to our witty contemporary for this testimony to our omniscience, and show our sense of their kindness by giving them two explanations. The first is, the story which has been told of its originating with a person who kept a house for the sale of toys and rags in Norton Falgate some century since, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 27. Saturday, May 4, 1850 • Various
... of the Bible. Not until he came upon a passage in the Talmud which awakened his doubts did he feel called upon to explain why God created humanity, though He knew it would become corrupt, and why He asks for information concerning things which cannot escape His omniscience. But Rashi was not bewildered by certain anthropomorphic passages in the Bible, the meaning of which so early a work as the Targum had veiled. Nor was he shocked by the fact that God let other peoples adore the stars, and that altars had been consecrated to Him elsewhere ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... it seems a great mistake to put before young children ideas which are really beyond the conception of an adult. There are many stories told of how children receive teaching about the Omniscience or Omnipotence of God. The stories sound irreverent, and are often repeated as highly amusing, but they are really more pathetic. Miss Shinn tells of one poor mite who resented being constantly watched and said, "I will not be so tagged," and another said, "Then I think He's a ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... know'st thou not her secret yet, her vainly veiled deficience, Whence it comes that all unwittingly she wounds the lives she loves? That sightless are those orbs of hers?—which bar to her omniscience Brings those fearful unfulfilments, that red ravage through her zones Whereat all ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy
... the curiosity of the reporter for the omniscience of the editor. And for a time Philip was restrained from intruding the subject of the Mavick sensation. However, one ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Forsytes always bat Had learned not to be a philosopher in the bosom of his family Hard-mouthed women who laid down the law He could not plead with her; even an old man has his dignity He had not wavered in the usual assumption of omniscience He saw himself reflected. An old-looking chap Health—He did not want it at such cost How long a starving man could go without losing his self-respect If only she weren't quite so self-contained Injustice of having an old and helpless body Instinctive rejection of all ...
— Quotations from the Works of John Galsworthy • David Widger
... suppose that Thomas availed himself of the invitation. It was sufficient to see. Such an act of cold scrutiny would hardly have been compatible with his joyous shout, "My Lord and my God." Christ's voice and form, omniscience and humility, in taking such trouble to win one to Himself—these were sufficient to convince him, ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... among the ancients is that related by Ovid in his "Metamorphoses," of Lycaon, king of Arcadia, who, entertaining Jupiter one day, set before him a hash of human flesh, to prove his omniscience, whereupon the god transferred ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... infirmity we cannot expect to find. Again, it is not the judge's business to fix the degree of moral guilt; that not even the best and wisest of men can do. The inscrutable fact of the degree of moral guilt eludes all human insight. Only omniscience could decide who is more guilty relatively to opportunities, advantages, circumstances; who has made the braver effort to escape wrongdoing; whether the admired preacher, or the culprit on his way to the gallows; whether the President in the White House or the wretch ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... premises? Is not a Creator bound to guard his children against the ruin which inherited ignorance might entail on them? Would it be fair for a parent to put into a child's hands the title-deeds to all its future possessions, and a bunch of matches? And are not men children, nay, babes, in the eye of Omniscience?—The minister grew bold in his questions. Had not he as good right ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... atoms, combining and forming shapes, forms, etc., are the basis of the material universe. It is held, however, that the power or energy whereby these atoms combine and thus form matter, comes from God. This teaching holds that God is a Personal Being, possessing Omnipotence, Omniscience, and Omnipresence. It is also held that there are two substances, or principles, higher, that the material energies or substance, namely, Manas, or Mind, and Atman, or Spirit. Manas or Mind is held to be something like a Mind-Stuff, from which all individual ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... really desire it should not exist, or could not prevent its existence. It might be well for those who inveigh against the logical consequences of necessarianism to bethink them of the logical consequences of theism; which are not only the same, when the attribute of Omniscience is ascribed to the Deity, but which bring out, from the existence of moral evil, a hopeless conflict between the attributes of Infinite Benevolence and Infinite Power, which, with no less assurance, are affirmed to ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... me that affairs had already progressed a long way. She had come to Briar Hills, flattering Jerry, of course, that they could be alone, intriguing meanwhile with Channing Lloyd, a wild fellow, according to Jack Ballard, who at thirty could have unprofitably shared his omniscience with the devil. A fine ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... Omniscience is at present the bane of all our knowledge. From the day he leaves school and enters the University a man ought to make up his mind that in many things he must either remain altogether ignorant, or be satisfied with knowledge at second-hand. Thus only can he clear the decks for action. ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... inorganic world, or in the harmonious allotment of the most varied gifts to different beings; definite recognition of time and space, as in the life of individuals, of species, in the stages of growth, in the geographical limitation of types; prescience and omniscience, as shown in the prophetic types of earlier geological ages; omnipresence, by the adjustment of the whole series of animal organisms to the various parts of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... Browning or Herbert Spencer. That year it happened that a party of students from Edinburgh University were camping in the neighbourhood, and they often joined us round the farm fire of an evening. They talked about books and opinions and men with all the omniscience of youth; but the two girls of the household held their own with them. Ah, Kate M'Intyre, you did me much friendly service in tying flies for me that summer, and teaching me something of the craft of fishing; but you did a far ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... sense of a broken bubble and a scattered dream, which had haunted him so long after he left Kinder, had entered into and helped toward his infatuation with his new masters. They brought him an indescribable sense of freedom—omniscience almost. ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... was born. Mr. Gladstone, so the story ran, was present at a dinner where among the guests was a distinguished Japanese; and, as not seldom happened, Mr. Gladstone monopolised the conversation, talking with fluency and seeming omniscience on a vast range of subjects, among which Japan came in for its share of attention. The distinguished stranger was asked later for his opinion of the English statesman. "A wonderful man," he said, "a truly wonderful man! He seems to know all about ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... need not cower before the fixed gaze of some stony god, looking on us unmoved like those Egyptian deities that sit pitiless with idle hands on their laps, and wide-open lidless eyes gazing out across the sands. We need not fear the Omnipresence of Love, nor the Omniscience which knows us altogether, and loves us even as it knows. Rather we shall be glad that we are ever in His Presence, and desire, as the height of all felicity and the power for all goodness, to walk all the day long in the light ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... which tempts the cunning lust of men to cry their praise for the nobility of heart that lies beneath. But what elusive charm is there in the mother of children whose stainless virtue is her only personality? None? Yet to the all-seeing eye, to the all-comprehending brain—to that omniscience whom some call God, be it in Trinity or in Unity, and others know not what to call—these are the women who lift immeasurably above ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... whole stab of the story is that man can't: because while evil does not care for good, good must care for evil. Or, in other words, man cannot escape from God, because good is the God in man; and insists on omniscience. This point, which is good psychology and also good theology and also good art, has missed its main intention merely because it was also ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... somewhat amused by her omniscience during the first interval, but it was not until the second that she came to the priceless report of our own ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford |
