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More "Certitude" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... or was to be, Save only death imperial. Thou and he Who has the heart of all men's hearts for lyre, Ye twain, being great of spirit as time is great, And sure of sight as truth's own heavenward eye, Beheld the forms of forces passing by And certitude of equal-balanced fate, Whose breath forefelt makes darkness palpitate, And knew that light should live and ...
— A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... come from abroad; the French passion for opposing, for struggling;—and beneath it all the large French indifference to the problem of evil (or whatever you like to call it), the changeless French content in certitude, upon which ease, indeed, as upon a rock, the Church of Gaul has permanently ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... that the doors of Paradise were open wide. Mr. Snyder, as Henry perceived, was apt unwittingly to give the impression that he, and not his clients, earned the wealth upon which he received ten per cent. commission. But Henry was not for a single instant blind to the certitude that, if his next book realized two thousand pounds, the credit would be due to himself, and to no other person whatever. Henry might be tongue-tied in front of Mark Snyder, but he was capable of estimating with some precision their relative ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... is a part of Nature, and Nature is governed by eternal and immutable laws. It must be just as possible, therefore, to apply the mathematical method to man, as it is to apply it to matter. It must be possible to determine, with the certitude obtainable in the exact sciences, what things are good for man and what means he has ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... Pitris. He also goeth to everlasting hell who though in possession of wealth, never giveth away nor enjoyeth himself from avarice, saying, he hath none.' The Yaksha asked,—'By what, O king, birth, behaviour, study, or learning doth a person become a Brahmana? Tell us with certitude!' Yudhishthira answered,—'Listen, O Yaksha! It is neither birth, nor study, nor learning, that is the cause of Brahmanahood, without doubt, it is behaviour that constitutes it. One's behaviour should always be well-guarded, especially by a Brahmana. He who maintaineth his conduct ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... would not send it; but at length Word being brought her that the child indeed No longer suffered, nor desired the breast, Her peace returned, and, giving thanks to God, All were united in new bonds of hope. Now being fixed in certitude of death, We stripped our souls of all their earthly gear, The useless raiment of this world; and thus, Striving together with a single will, In daily increment of faith and power, We were much comforted by heavenly dreams, And waking visitations of God's ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... rendre nulle une partie des forces de l'ennemi afin de reunir toutes les siennes contre celles qui l'on attaque, ou qui attaquent; et de vaincre ensuite le reste avec plus de facilite et de certitude. ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett
... before touching the sacred soil which I had taken so long to reach, and I longed to be able to drink its health; but though I had gone, I suppose, ten miles, and though the heat was increasing, I would not stop; for I remembered the two francs, and my former certitude of reaching Milan was shaking and crumbling. The great heat of midday would soon be on me, I had yet nearly thirty miles to go, and my bad ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... glancing along the lines before he removed the screen and called another eye to behold. He had drawn them up, with their banners, to fill Geoffrey, at once, with his own confidence and knowledge—for it was knowledge and certitude, not opinion ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... the hitch of our adventure; for when the policeman, still closely following us, beheld my two boxes lying in the rain, he arose from mere suspicion to a kind of certitude of something evil. The light in the house had been extinguished; the whole frontage of the street was dark; there was nothing to explain the presence of these unguarded trunks; and no two innocent people were ever, I believe, detected in such ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... heavier. On my long ride from Antwerp, with the buoyancy of youth, I had passed through all the phases from anguished fear to the almost certitude of hope, and I had entered Paris feeling sure that I would find my father well again when I should reach America. I had entered Paris also joyous with the thought of seeing mademoiselle once more, ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... such little dramas, which in no way affected the tenderness of their hearts, these two beings adored each other with the presentiment and, gradually, the cruel certitude of an approaching separation, when suddenly there occurred in Felicia's life a horrible event. One day, Jenkins had taken her to dine at his house, as often happened. Mme. Jenkins was away on a couple of days' visit, as also ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... brings night upon us may leave the stars with us. Cimourdain was full of virtues, full of truths, but they shone in the midst of darkness" (i. 123). If the aristocrat had rigidity, so had the Jacobin. "Cimourdain had the blind certitude of the arrow, which only sees the mark and makes for it. In revolution, nothing so formidable as the straight line. Cimourdain strode forward with fatality in his step. He believed that in social genesis the very extreme point must always be solid ground, an error peculiar to minds that for reason ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... with the now perfected compound has been put off one more day. F is completely calm and confident of the outcome. She is below now, making lastminute preparations. For the first time she has infected me with her certitude—although I never doubted ultimate success—and I feel tomorrow will actually see the beginning of the end for the Grass which started so long ago on Mrs Dinkman's lawn. How far I and the world have ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... on his neckerchief, questioned him closely. The coward fumbling at an answer, she was presently convinced of his guilt, and forthwith denounced him for a member of the gang to M. Pacome, an officer of the Guard. Straightly did M. Pacome summon Du Chtelet, and, assuming his guilt for certitude, bade him surrender his captain. 'My friend,' said he, 'I know you for an associate of Cartouche. Your hands are soiled with murder and rapine. Confess the hiding-place of Cartouche, or in twenty-four hours you are broken on the wheel.' ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... guns in concealed positions. In addition they perfected the mobility of even the heaviest of pieces, so that it became impossible for observation from the Franco-British ships or from aeroplanes to locate them with any certitude. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... bows to them with respect; those earnings that permit one to fall ill, to face old age and death without apprehension, the assurance the children shall want for nothing, shall have a proper education—the certitude that the two little rooms occupied can really be called home; that the furniture so carefully waxed and polished is one's own forever. Bah! what terrors can lack of work, food shortage, or war hold for such people? ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... kill me. The definition of the cause was vague, but the thought itself was no mere morbid artificiality of sentiment but a genuine conviction. "That sort of thing" was what I would have to die from. It wouldn't be from the innumerable doubts. Any sort of certitude would be also deadly. It wouldn't be from a stab—a kiss would kill me as surely. It would not be from a frown or from any particular word or any particular act—but from having to bear them all, together and in succession—from having to live with "that sort of thing." About the ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... devastation of death's inroads. As he brought the Christian faith to bear upon the problem, he imparted by clarity of thought and eloquence of words as well as by accent and genuineness of emotion that certitude which is possible only for one who himself possesses that which he proclaims. This sermon was a notable example of Phillips Brooks' definition of preaching, "Truth conveyed through personality." The few notes here included give only a glimmer of the range of his thought, and do not adequately ...
— Frank H. Nelson of Cincinnati • Warren C. Herrick
... do not ridicule two children who love each other with a passion which is true and pure, because it is founded upon a knowledge of each other's character; on the certitude of their mutual ardor in conquering the difficulties of life; in a word, of two children who will also cherish ...
— Mercadet - A Comedy In Three Acts • Honore De Balzac
... "experience" with him does not mean enthusiastic visions and raptures. He puts as little value on ecstasies and emotional vapourings as he does on dialectic. Ecstasies lead men as often on false trails as on right tracks. They supply no criterion of certitude; they furnish no concrete ideas or ideals to live by; but still further, they do not bring all the deep-lying powers of the soul into play as any true source of religion must do. He is striving to find a foundation-principle for the spiritual life which shall not be capricious ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... let us be true To one another! for the world which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... may be given to some of those unusuall Chances that sometimes produce the most surprizing effects. Besides altho the vivacity and force of imagination be easily admitted into the relations of the Languages, and leaves there forcible impressions, yet it neither warrants certitude, nor dislodgeth confusion; 'tis reason alone that establisheth the mind in its cognizances, and credits all its conceptions with order, tis that alone which perfects the combination of all their relations and agreements according to the naturall connexion which they have with the same principles ...
— A Philosophicall Essay for the Reunion of the Languages - Or, The Art of Knowing All by the Mastery of One • Pierre Besnier
... 'Tis to me A thunder storm in stone, with Sinai flare Across the Ages. 'Tis the Fiend's despair And the Arch-angel's Triumph. It sets free The mind and soul with certitude, Christ's key Which, like the Sun, opes Heaven—the Good and Fair. Still, oft, what darkness drowns the sun's noon glare Within the Temple! 'Tis ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... there raged in his mind the coil of this discovery; then cheerless certitude followed; and, with an incredible simplicity of submission to ascertained fact, he turned round and struck out for shore. There was a courage in this which he could not appreciate; the ignobility of his cowardice wholly occupying him. A strong current set against him like a wind ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... penitence; the righteous justified without love; all Christians without the grace of Jesus Christ; God without power over the will of men; a predestination without mystery; a redemption without certitude! ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... bride and groom with fairly fascinated eyes, but from a certain distance. They had been nice, they had thanked her handsomely for her handsome present, but nothing could modify her regretful certitude that Brenda did not care for her. And it might so easily have been she and not the good Aunt Brenda who secured for the sposo his career of silver lace and sabre.... And Brenda, innocently unknowing, would just the same not have liked her. But there! Beautiful Brenda didn't go about loving ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... aware, scarcely the word escaped my lips, that swift ensued in silence and by stealth, and yet with certitude, a formidable change of the amphitheatre which held the Carnival; although the human stir continued just the same amid that shift of ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... things my wish is to see her, so I may know an she be chaste or not. As for her beauty, I am assured of [122] your worship's sufficiency and am content to trust to your word concerning her loveliness, to wit, that she is surpassing; but, for her chastity, you cannot avail to testify with certitude of her case." "And how," asked the Imam, "can it be possible unto you, O my lord the Amir, to know from her face that she is pure? An this be so, your highness is skilled in physiognomy. However, an your highness will vouchsafe to accompany me, I will carry you to her father's palace and ...
— Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp • John Payne
... the tide of caucuses swelled and reports of results flowed into State headquarters, Chairman Presson and his lieutenants found themselves unable to mark men with the old certitude of touch. There was a queer kind of slipperiness everywhere. It was evident that the Canibas result had stiffened backbones in many quarters, but more new men than usual were coming forward with nominations in their fists. Many of these men were not telling any one how they felt on the ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... ordering the course of events that man should emerge one day from the savagedom and animalism of the past to enter upon the path of a progress which we believe to be endless. I say the reason which demonstrates this to us with a certitude which not the most intolerant bigotry dares to question to-day, tells us also that it is wholly preposterous that all that is left to man wherein to work out his own individual moral progress is the brief span of threescore years and ten, that after these ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... he had made known as much already— his visits had been a series of eloquent intimations of it. But now he had affirmed it in lover's vows, and, as a memorable sign of it, he had passed his arm round the girl's waist and taken a kiss. This happy certitude had come sooner than Catherine expected, and she had regarded it, very naturally, as a priceless treasure. It may even be doubted whether she had ever definitely expected to possess it; she had not been waiting for it, and she ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... to glory, not because we confess, but because He has promised pardon to those who do confess; that is, not because of the worthiness or sufficiency of our confession (for there is no such worthiness or sufficiency), but because of the truth and certitude of His promise, as says the xxiv. Psalm: "For Thy Name's sake, O Lord, pardon mine iniquity." [Ps. 25:35] It does not say, "for my sake," or "for my worthiness' sake," or "for my name's sake," but "for Thy Name's sake." So it is evident that ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... it may seem, is not a mere futile imagining. It is sustained and rendered plausible by a sound substratum of knowledge of the anatomical conditions under which the central nervous mechanism exists, and in default of which, as pathology demonstrates with no less certitude, its functionings are futile to produce the normal manifestations ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... Russian Finns, and a slight sprinkling of Americans and English. It was noted that there was nothing mercurial and flyaway about them. They seemed weighty men, oppressed by a sad and stolid bovine-sort of integrity. A sober seriousness and enormous certitude characterized all of them. They appeared men without nerves and without fear, as though upheld by some overwhelming power or carried in the hollow of some superhuman hand. The captain, a sad-eyed, strong-featured American, was cartooned ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... deepest need of your heart. Nothing but the King's own sign-manual on the pardon makes it valid; and unless you and I can, somehow or other, come to close grips with God, and get into actual contact with Him, and hear, somehow, with infallible certitude, as from His own lips, the assurance of forgiveness, there is not enough for ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... almost beyond control by this speech. To have a ramshackle young woman from Hampstead patting her on the back as it were, in breezy certitude that quite soon she would improve, stirred her more deeply than anything had stirred her since her first discovery that Mr. Fisher was not what he seemed. Mrs. Wilkins must certainly be curbed. But how? There was a curious imperviousness about her. At ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... piano, with the first two ringing bars, masterfully, like a man; she seemed to lift it, and its sounding wires, with her two hands, with the strength and certitude of maleness. And then, as only he had heard men do it, she sank, or leaped—he could scarcely say which—to the sureness and pureness and ineffable ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... drove the dogs from the shelter of the rock into the teeth of the storm. Then, turning, they fled south before the gale with what certitude they might. They had nothing to guide them, neither stars nor brilliant aurora, and they struggled along the heavy trail only by their memories of it, and the exercise of every particle ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... tried to complete it by considerations of my own, which are implied in my University sermons, Essay on Ecclesiastical Miracles, and Essay on Development of Doctrine. My argument is in outline as follows: that that absolute certitude which we were able to possess, whether as to the truths of natural theology, or as to the fact of a revelation, was the result of an assemblage of concurring and converging probabilities, and that, ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... astonishment when I saw that toryism was as openly professed as whiggism itself: however, at that time I believed that all good Americans were united together; that the confidence of congress in you was unbounded. Then I entertained the certitude that America would be independent in case she should not lose you. Take away, for an instant, that modest diffidence of yourself, (which, pardon my freedom, my dear General, is sometimes too great, and I wish you could know, as well as myself, what difference ...
— Memoirs, Correspondence and Manuscripts of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... and some of the features of his tutelage. The basis of it all was that, harmless as he appeared, he was not to be trusted; I remember how portentous that truth soon looked, both in the light of his intense amiability and of sister Helen's absolute certitude. He wasn't to be trusted—it was the sole very definite fact about him except the fact that he had so kindly come down from the far-off Beaverkill to regale us with the perfect demonstration, dutifully, resignedly setting himself ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... us return to the stand-point taken up by the North-Netherlanders who first set sail for the Indies in 1595. They "knew in part" only: they were aware that they knew nothing with certitude. But their mercantile interests very soon induced them to try to increase and strengthen their information concerning the regions of the East. What sort of country after all was this much-discussed New-Guinea, they ...
— The Part Borne by the Dutch in the Discovery of Australia 1606-1765 • J. E. Heeres
... calumny, capillary, captious, cardinal, carnal, carnivorous, castigate, cataclysm, catastrophe, category, causality, cavernous, celebrity, celibacy, censorious, ceramics, cerebration, certitude, cessation, charlatan, chimerical, chronology, circuitous, circumlocution, citation, clandestine, clarify, clemency, coadjutor, coagulate, coalesce, coercion, cogency, cognizant, cohesion, coincidence, collusion, colossal, comatose, combustible, commendatory, commensurate, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... Zwingli to meet death, and bear the harshest tortures for their faith. For they run to suffer punishments, no matter how horrible, as if to a banquet; so that if you take that as a test either of the truth of doctrine or of their certitude of grace, you would easily conclude that in no other sect is to be found a faith so true or grace so certain. But as Paul wrote: "Even if I give my body to to be burned and have not charity, it avails me naught. But he has not charity who divides the unity. . . . He cannot be a martyr ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... destruction appeared, the more intense grew the spiritual vision which opposed them. We learn from these records that the mystical consciousness has the power of lifting those who possess it to a plane of reality which no struggle, no cruelty, can disturb: of conferring a certitude which no catastrophe can wreck. Yet it does not wrap its initiates in a selfish and otherworldly calm, isolate them from the pain and effort of the common life. Rather, it gives them renewed vitality; administering to the human spirit not—as some suppose—a soothing draught, but the ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... practical importance; for otherwise we shall not know how to change it or indeed that it ought to be changed at all. Only by knowing other ways of life can we be certain of the relative worth of our own way; knowledge alone gives certitude. Without knowledge we run the risk of becoming ruthless destroyers of things which an intelligent sympathy might well preserve and find a place ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... is no less certain that the present actual world reposed potentially in the cosmic vapour, and that an intelligence, if great enough, could from his knowledge of the properties of the molecules of that vapour have predicted the state of the fauna in Great Britain in 1888 with as much certitude as we say what will happen to the vapour of our breath on a ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... puisque des opinions formees d'apres l'experience ... sont la seule regle de la conduite des hommes les plus sages, pourquoi interdirait-on au philosophe d'appuyer ses conjectures sur cette meme base, pourvu qu'il ne leur attribue pas une certitude superieure a celle qui peut naitre du nombre, de la constance, de l'exactitude des observations?"—CONDORCET, Esquisse d'un Tableau Historique des ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... her house of its deckings, dismantling her habitation to the last and uttermost leaf; but she stripped, dismantled, extinguished, broke away, not in despair, defeat, but in ordered preparation and with exquisite certitude of glory anew. That, in October, was her voice to him, stirring tremendously that faculty of his of seeing more clearly, visioning life more poignantly, with his mind than with his eye. She spoke to him ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... exasperation, 'Oh, it's you! Why are you here? If I am so odious to you that you must write to my sister to say so, I give you back your word.' But then, don't you see, it could not have been that. I have the practical certitude that soon afterwards they went together in a hansom to see the ship—as agreed. That was my reason for saying that Flora de Barral ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... the properties both of religion and of liberty, and one of its factors never became an object of disinterested observation among actual leaders of opinion. They preferred the argument of doubt to the argument of certitude, and sought to defeat intolerance by casting out revelation as they had defeated the persecution of witches by casting out the devil. There remained a flaw in their liberalism, for liberty apart from belief is ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... crude and immoral maxims mixed up with noble precepts in Revelation; to those who recognised the impossibility of accepting the varying voices of Intuition as a moral guide; to all those the theory that Morality was based on Utility, came as a welcome and rational relief. It promised a scientific certitude to moral precepts; it left the intellect free to inquire and to challenge; it threw man back on grounds which were found in this world alone, and could be tested by reason and experience; it derived no authority from antiquity, no sanction from religion; it ...
— The Basis of Morality • Annie Besant
... whom we have already introduced to our respectable readers, had evacuated the chapel, they determined to substantiate a certitude, as far as their observation could reach, as to the truth of what Kitty Carroll had hinted at, in reference to John O'Callaghan's attachment to Rose Galh O'Hallaghan, and her taciturn approval of it. For this purpose they kept their eye upon John, who certainly seemed in no especial ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... great thinkers of earlier times, to gain a general view of the universe of being; but had sought it by a different mode. Caring rather for certitude of method, reality in the highest principles, than for results attained, he had seen that a knowledge of being must rest on a knowledge of the consciousness which tells us of being. His principle, "Cogito, ergo sum," ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... in the saddle and Dillon confidently led the way. Coburn grimly walked beside her as she rode. He was convinced that he wouldn't leave her side while Dillon was around. But even as he knew that desperate certitude, he was filled with confusion and ...
— The Invaders • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... mesure que je montais l'escalier, ma certitude devenait plus grande: secrtaire du sous-prfet; je ne me sentais ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... Major," said Jeekie sympathetically. "Perhaps manage hook it somehow, and meanwhile make best of bad business and have high old time. You see you want to come Asiki-land, though I tell you it rum place, and," he added with certitude and a circular sweep of his hand, "by Jingo! you here now and I daresay they give you all ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... heart wrung with the sorrow that beauty is less strong than time. Nor is the burden of these poems only that pleasant things decay; rather that in nothing good or bad, rich or mean, is there permanence or certitude, but everywhere and without selection Time feeds oblivion with decay of things. All things flow and nothing abides; shape and name, nature and fortune yield to the dissolving ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... L'Autre by George Sand, and in Jean-Marie, a little masterpiece by Andre Theuriet, which had the most brilliant success. Porel played the part of Jean-Marie. He was at that time slender, and full of hope. Since then his slenderness has developed into plumpness and his hope into certitude. ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... around, and without comparative reference to this can not be represented: the same experience which gives us the definite object gives us also the infinite space; and both terms—the limited appearance and the unlimited ground—are apprehended with equal certitude and clearness, and furnished with names equally susceptible of distinct use in predication and reasoning. The transient successions, for instance, the strokes of a clock, which we count, present themselves to us as dotted out upon a line of permanent duration; of which, without them, we should ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... j'etais occupee pendant ces dernieres 3 semaines. La Crise est passee et j'ai tout lieu de croire que le Gouvernement de Sir R. Peel va s'affermir de plus en plus, ce que je ne puis que desirer pour le bien-etre du pays. Je dois cependant dire a votre Majeste que si le Ministere eut change, j'ai la certitude que le nouveau se serait empresse de maintenir, comme nous le desirons si vivement, cette entente cordiale si heureusement etablie ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... certitude Berrie unsaddled her horse, turned him loose, and lent a skilful hand at removing the panniers from the pack-animals, while Wayland, willing but a little uncertain, stood awkwardly about. Under her instruction he collected dead branches of a standing fir, and from ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... my books, are but the drama of my conscience exteriorized? Out of the reservoirs of my soul I draw my inspiration. I have an aesthetic horror of evidence; like Renan, I loathe the deadly heresy of affirmation; I have the certitude of doubt, for are we poets not the lovers of the truth decorated? When I built my lordly palace of art, it was not with the ugly durability of marble. No; like the Mohammedan who constructed his mosque and mingled with the cement sweet-smelling musk, so ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... show mercy to every generation, And to his kingdom of his great goodness call His elected spouse or faithful congregation, As here shall appear by open protestation, Which from Christ's birth shall to his death conclude: They come, that thereof will show the certitude. ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley
... its light we carry on all our affairs, and the success of our action while we rely upon it is the best proof of its truth. The imaginative parsimony and discipline which such a theory involves are balanced by the immense extension and certitude it gives to knowledge. It is at once an act of allegiance to nature and a Magna Charta which mind imposes on the tyrannous world, which in turn pledges itself before the assembled faculties of man not to exceed its constitutional privilege and to harbour no magic ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... imaginative mind, thus concentrated upon them, could have divined all this; yet to O'Malley it seemed plain as the day. With the certitude, moreover, came the feeling, ever stronger, that the refuge they sought would prove to be also the refuge he himself sought, the difference being that whereas they ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... and ashamed of the part he was playing. He had loved her now for two years, with the tranquil tenderness that gathers depth and volume as it nears fulfilment; he knew that she would wait for him—but the certitude was an added pang. There are times when the constancy of the woman one cannot marry is almost as trying as that of the woman one does ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... artificial light flickering in the depths of its silent heart. So faint was it, at the distance, that, for a while, doubt prevailed. Then conviction supervened as each of the watchers recorded his observation and a sigh of certitude made itself heard. The point of light was held by all. It was dwelt upon. It was the verification needed to convey absolute faith ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... perpetuity; but only during one natural day; from one evening including the night, to the evening of the following day." At these words Francis humbly bowed down his head. As he went away, the Pope asked him: "Whither art thou going, simple man? What certitude hast thou of what thou hast just been granted?" "Holy Father," he replied, "your word is sufficient for me. If this indulgence is the work of God, He will make it manifest. Let Jesus Christ and His Blessed Mother, and the ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... to say concerning many of the dicta of religiosity, that they cannot affirm their truth. They are prepared to say concerning the experience of God and the soul, that they know these with an indefeasible certitude. This just and wholesome attitude toward religious truth is only a corollary of the attitude which science has taught ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... a matter of certitude that within the memory of men now living, the Falls have receded 100 feet, and authorities in that science have stated the fact, that the retrocession—estimated from one inch to one foot per year—began near Lewiston. The whole waters of the lakes there foamed over this dam several ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler
... faith having all the certitude of religion and all the mystery of science. The modern Theosophist holds, with the Buddhists, that we live an incalculable number of times on this earth, in as many several bodies, because one life is not long ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... by the kill, eating and sleeping, turn and turn about. Then, rested, refreshed and strong, he turned his face toward camp and John Thornton. He broke into the long easy lope, and went on, hour after hour, never at loss for the tangled way, heading straight home through strange country with a certitude of direction that put man and his magnetic ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... in an entirely abnormal state, he had a curious certitude of the proper course to adopt. He went up to a policeman ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... the soldier's lips. The patroon!—his ill-disguised admiration for the actress!—his abrupt reappearance the night of the temperance drama! Any uncertainty Saint-Prosper might have felt regarding the identity of him he sought, or the reason for that day's work, now became compelling certitude. But for the tenants, he might have ridden by the old patroon house. As it was, congratulating himself upon this accidental meeting rather than his own shrewdness, he quickly dismounted. A moment's thought, and ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... already, poor John Berridge, tasted in their fulness the sweets of success; but nothing yet had been more charming to him than when the young Lord, as he irresistibly and, for greater certitude, quite correctly figured him, fairly sought out, in Paris, the new literary star that had begun to hang, with a fresh red light, over the vast, even though rather confused, Anglo-Saxon horizon; positively approaching that celebrity with a shy and artless appeal. The young Lord invoked ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... like them, but, contrariwise, canst refresh and satiate the thirsty lips of them all? Who art Thou that dost proclaim Thyself as sufficient for the fruition of the mind that yearns for truth and thirsts for certitude, of the parched heart that wearies and cracks for want of love, of the will that longs to be rightly and lovingly commanded? Oh, dear brethren, not only the Titanic presumption of proposing oneself as enough for a single soul, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... which is born and ends {144} in the mind is termed scientific; that which issues from science and ends in manual work is termed semi-mechanical. But I consider vain and full of error that science which is not the offspring of experience, mother of all certitude, and which does not result in established experience, that is to say, whose origin, middle and end do not pass through any of the five senses. And if we doubt of everything we perceive by the senses, should we not doubt much more of what is contrary to the senses, such as ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... was that, once she got free of her husband, she would indeed be his. That he must hold to. It was Quisante, not she herself, who made her now feel strange to him; and Quisante's spell was not to last; her quiet certitude that her husband's days were numbered carried conviction to him also. "But I won't talk any more about it ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... therefore its mechanism is simple; its pieces all fit into each other with precision; they transmit throughout exactly the impulsion received and thus operate at one stroke, with uniformity, instantaneously, with certitude, oil all parts of the territory; the lever which starts the machine is central and, throughout its various services, the new rulers hold this lever in hand. Apropos of local administration, the Duc d'Angouleme said in 1815,[6304] "We prefer the departments to the provinces." In ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... seen, is a perfectly well-established site, and we owe our certitude upon the matter to the fact that the Romans had hardened and straightened what was probably an old British track. But with the crossing of the Icknield Way no such complete certitude exists, for the Icknield Way was but a vague barbarian track, often tortuous in outline, confused by branching ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... here with your lovely sister, and do you stay night and day till our sad separation? I rejoice me with that hope during this week do not deceive my heart. I hope that card very clear, mais, pour plus de certitude, je vous dis en franois que votre chambre, la maison, les habitants de juniper, tout est prt recevoir la premire ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... telles ou telles tendances ne serons nous pas en droit de conclure que ces tendances etaient en desacord flagrant avec les principes fondamentaux du christianisme? Cette presomption ne se transformerait-elle pas en certitude si nous reconnaissons dans la doctrine universellement repoussee par l'Eglise les traits caracteristiques de l'une des religions du passe? Pour dire que le gnosticisme ou l'ebionitisme sont les formes legitimes de la pensee chretienne il faut dire hardiment qu'il n'y a pas de pensee chretienne, ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... royal pathway and the divinely inspired authority of our holy Fathers and the traditions of the Catholic Church for, as we all know, the Holy Spirit dwells in her, define with all certitude and accuracy, that just as the figure of the precious and life-giving cross, so also the venerable and holy images, as well in painting and mosaic, as of other fit materials, should be set forth in the holy churches of God, and on the ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... to think. It was twenty-four hours since that man left his room. Razumov had a distinct feeling that Haldin in the fortress was sleeping that night. It was a certitude which made him angry because he did not want to think of Haldin, but he justified it to himself by physiological and psychological reasons. The fellow had hardly slept for weeks on his own confession, and now every incertitude was at an end for him. No doubt ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... to seem to Winterbourne more and more a matter of fine-spun gallantry. As I have already had occasion to relate, he was angry at finding himself reduced to chopping logic about this young lady; he was vexed at his want of instinctive certitude as to how far her eccentricities were generic, national, and how far they were personal. From either view of them he had somehow missed her, and now it was too late. She was "carried ...
— Daisy Miller • Henry James
... old butler. Well—her letter is still lying there. It has not been called for. Ergo, this town is not his usual abode. Personally, I never thought it was. But he cannot fail to turn up some time or other. Our main hope lies just in the certitude that he must come to town sooner or later. Remember he doesn't know that the butler is dead, and he will want to inquire for a letter. Well, he'll find a ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... beautiful secret is the most blest. Thus, for the week following this day of days, Theophil and Isabel went about their daily lives with all heaven in their hearts, and, divided though they were, possessed by a mystical certitude of inner union which they felt no extension of space or ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... wished to rent a bedroom. Thus by good fortune Sophia let all her rooms immediately, and was sure of over two hundred francs a month, apart from the profit on meals supplied. On this latter occasion Chirac (and his companion too) was quite optimistic, reiterating an absolute certitude that Paris could never be invested. Briefly, Sophia did not believe him. She believed the candidly despairing Chirac. She had no information, no wide theory, to justify her pessimism; nothing but ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... the staircase struck not only the half hour, but the hour, and yet, though every room and corridor, the cellar and the garret, were searched, no token was found of the young wife's presence. Meanwhile the husband stood like a statue on the threshold, waiting with what seemed to me a strange certitude for the return of the father from his ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... bench at the beginning of the avenue sat a man with two women. As I advanced with my companions he rose, after a sudden stare, and approached me with a smile in which (to be Johnsonian for a moment) certitude was mitigated by modesty and eagerness was embellished with respect. He came toward me with a salutation that I had seen before, and I am happy to say that after an instant I ceased to be guilty of the brutality of not knowing ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... superior air of scientific wisdom, is often only the opposite pole of the dogmatic certitude of the churchman. Actual knowledge of the human soul is quite as far removed from the one as from the other. Credulity and Incredulity simply annul each other; often make faces at each other; while Progress stalks alone in the middle ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... these fragments of an immense plastic production is added the analysis furnished by the written records, we can define with some degree of certitude the place occupied by Wu Tao-tz[)u] in the history of Chinese painting. The books state that the lines from his brush fairly vibrated; all united in marvelling at the spirituality emanating from forms thus defined. ...
— Chinese Painters - A Critical Study • Raphael Petrucci
... enfeebled powers, and a vague determination to universal distrust and suspicion. Suddenly he felt himself vibrating to loud tones, which seemed like the thundering echo of his own passion. A voice that penetrated his very marrow with its accent of triumphant certitude was saying—"The day of vengeance is ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... along he came into valleys or swales where game was more plentiful. A band of caribou passed by, twenty and odd animals, tantalizingly within rifle range. He felt a wild desire to run after them, a certitude that he could run them down. A black fox came toward him, carrying a ptarmigan in his mouth. The man shouted. It was a fearful cry, but the fox, leaping away in fright, did not ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... BETA}) the various metaphysical tests of truth or grounds of certitude employed. ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... shadows I cast, one with a sort of feminine faintness with regard to the other and not quite so tall, may not have suggested the word or the thought of an assignation to my mind. All that I have clear is that with the certitude of intuition I knew what it was that had brought the youth in evening dress outside the shrubbery. Of course! He ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... Cfr. Ripalda, De Ente Supernaturali, disp. 30. Under these circumstances Suarez was justified in saying, in regard to the degree of certitude to be attributed to this teaching: "Si quis negaret gratiam sanctificantem esse habitum, licet esse temere dictum, non posset tamen ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... as fast as steam could carry them, were the bride and groom. The wondrousness of the first hour of their journey side by side had become a joyous certitude that always it was to be ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter
... cannot answer." He cannot answer a question on which the value of his whole system of physical philosophy depends; uncertain about his own identity, about the evidence of his senses, he would make the latter the sole rule and measure of certitude, and deny to man any higher faculty by which alone he can justify his trust in his cognitive faculties. Another instance of his absolute ignorance of common philosophic terminology is when he asserts that according to theology we know the dogmas of ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... doctrine of nature and of morals, while metaphysics treats of the highest presuppositions and the ultimate grounds,—the "pro-principles," Campanella starts, as Augustine before him and Descartes in later times, from the indisputable certitude of the spirit's own existence, from which he rises to the certitude of God's existence. On this first certain truth of my own existence there follow three others: my nature consists in the three functions of power, ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... it," said Snarley, whose suspicions were now raised to certitude, "and, what's more, I won't hear it. What's the good? If anybody's been talkin' about nightingales, it's sure to be rubbish. Nightingales is things you can't talk about, but only listen to. No, thank you, my lady. When I wants nightingales, I'll go and hear 'em. I don't want to know what ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... virtue and the immutability of justice. He sought to delineate and enforce the practical duties of life. His great object was the elucidation of morals; and he was the first to teach ethics systematically from the immutable principles of moral obligation. Moral certitude was the lofty platform from which he surveyed the world, and upon which, as a rock, he rested in the storms of life. Thus he was a reformer and a moralist. It was his ethical doctrines which were most antagonistic to the age and the least appreciated. He was a profoundly religious man, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... were an established ritual. Had she been using her son's sick-room, Phyllis wondered, as a regular weeping-place? She could feel in Mrs. Harrington, even in this mortal sickness, the tremendous driving influence which is often part of a passionately active and not very wise personality. That certitude and insistence of Mrs. Harrington's could hammer you finally into believing or doing almost anything. Phyllis wondered how much his mother's heartbroken adoration and pity might have had to do with making her son as ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer
... With equal certitude the court declared that it was the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is. "Those who apply the rule to particular cases, must of necessity expound and interpret that rule. If two laws conflict with each other, the courts must decide on the ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... fellow patients, and was the confidante of many tragic stories which made her own lot seem light in comparison. Altogether she was more cheerful and hopeful than for months back, but the nurses looked dubious, and could not be induced to speak of her recovery with any certitude. ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... he had a various language, the inherited knowledge of his race, and the faculty of flight, by means of which he could shoot, meteor-like, across the sky, and pass swiftly from place to place, and with it such perfect control over all his organs, such marvellous certitude in all his motions, as to be able to drop himself plumb down from the tallest tree-top or out of the void air, on to a slender spray, and scarcely cause its leaves to tremble. Now, on this morning, he lies stiff and motionless; if you were to take him up and drop him from your hand, he would fall ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... to this world; and his utterances in his soliloquy are only an accentuate and outcome of this feeling of uncertainty. The very root of his desire for death is that he cannot discard with any feeling of certitude the Protestant doctrine that no traveller does after death return from the invisible world, and that the so-called ghosts are a ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... that absolute certitude as to the truths of natural theology was the result of an assemblage of concurring and converging probabilities ... that probabilities which did not reach to logical certainty might ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... fashion, accept Butler's famous saying that 'probability is the guide of life.' Newman, believing in the necessity of dogma, holds that we are justified in transmuting the belief corresponding to probability into such 'certitude' as corresponds to demonstration. He does so by the help of appeals to our conscience, which, for the reasons just given, fail to have any force for his opponent. Fitzjames adhered steadily to Butler's doctrine. There is, he says, ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... it particularly struck him that they were to be marked altogether in Waymarsh's quarter. This added to his own sense of having gone far with her-gave him an early illustration of a much shorter course. There was a certitude he immediately grasped—a conviction that Waymarsh would quite fail, as it were, and on whatever degree of ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... indefiniteness with which the Supreme power has fashioned the natures of women." But as there is not "one level of feminine incompetence as strict as the ability to count three and no more, the social lot of woman cannot be treated with scientific certitude." It is treated with a dissective delineation in the women of George Eliot unequalled ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... after hope, effort, weariness, failure, painfully alternating and recurring, it is an immense relief to the exhausted mind to be able to say, "At length I know that I can know nothing about anything." ... Ignorance remains the evil which it ever was, but something of the peace of certitude is gained in knowing the worst, and in having reconciled the mind to the endurance of it.'[16] Precisely, and what one would say of our own age is that it will not deliberately face this knowledge ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... there were several of the bags, and each more or less broken, the powder was spread widely on the floor. Had any of us ever seen giant powder? No, nobody had; and instantly there grew up in my mind a shadowy belief, verging with every moment nearer to certitude, that I had somewhere heard somebody describe it as just such a powder as the one around us. I have learnt since that it is a substance not unlike tallow, and is made up in rolls for all the world like ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Some of the masters whose influence left a trace upon my character to this very day, combined a fierceness of conception with a certitude of execution upon the basis of just appreciation of means and ends which is the highest quality of the man of action. And an artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... an earnest seeker after truth. Reason, for him, is a serviceable weapon of attack or defence, but he is like a man fighting with magic impenetrable armour. He enjoys a bout of logical fence; but it will decide nothing for him: his 'certitude' is independent of it. It is easy to see that such an attitude must appear profoundly dishonest to any man who accepts Locke's maxim about truth-seeking. It is equally easy to see that Newman would spurn the charge of dishonesty as hotly as the charge of ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... I was not even sure whether he had given me the right bundle. I rather suspect he wanted me to take care of another batch of his papers which, after his death, I saw the manager examining under the lamp. And the girl talked, easing her pain in the certitude of my sympathy; she talked as thirsty men drink. I had heard that her engagement with Kurtz had been disapproved by her people. He wasn't rich enough or something. And indeed I don't know whether he had not ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... court par le vent emporte Avec la certitude et la rapidite Du javelot cherchant la cible; Rien n'en tombe, et pourtant il chemine en semant; Sa rondeur, qu'on distingue en haut confusement, Semble ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... of, and can find in it infinite treasures. We can lay our poor hands on His love as a child might lay its tiny palm upon the base of some great cliff, and hold that love in a real grasp of a real knowledge and certitude, but we cannot put our hands round it and feel that we comprehend as well as apprehend. Let us be thankful ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... great a siccity of devotion as we see in these days, we have a thousand and a thousand colleges that pass it over commodiously enough, expecting every day their dinner from the liberality of Heaven. Secondly, they do not take notice that this certitude upon which they so much rely is not much less uncertain and hazardous than hazard itself. I see misery as near beyond two thousand crowns a year as if it stood close by me; for besides that it is in the power of chance to make a hundred breaches to poverty ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... other texts I could put my finger on. No, there is no use in talking, the partisans of the glorious kingdom are supported with certitude by inspired passages, and can, under certain conditions and without fear of heresy, uphold this doctrine, which, Saint Jerome attests, was in the fourth century a dogma of faith recognized by all. But what ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... themselves heroes when playing a game of corks. The official placards, the trash in the journals, inspired him with immense disgust, for they had never lied so boldly or flattered the people with so much low meanness. It was with a despairing heart and the certitude of final disaster that Amedee, needing a little sleep after the fatigue, wandered through Paris's obscure streets, barely lighted here and there by petroleum lamps, under the dark, opaque winter sky, where the echoes of the distant ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... ex-seminarian, casuist, and marvellous prose writer of France? The large, loosely modelled head with its fleshy curves, its super-subtle mouth of orator, the gaze veiled, the bland, pontifical expression, the expression of the man who spoke of "the mania of certitude"—here is Ernest Renan, voluptuous disdainer of democracies, and planner of a phalanstery of superior men years before Nietzsche's superman appeared. Zorn in no unkindly spirit shows us the thinker; also the author of L'Abbesse de Jouarre. It is something, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... Truth, I have dived, and dared to fetch ensnared this Fragment of tested Sooth; And one of the purblind Race of Men peered with a curious Eye Over the Curb as I fetched it forth, and besought me to drop that Lie: But all ye who long for Certitude, and who yearn for the Ultimate Fact, Who know the Truth and in spite of Ruth tear piecemeal the Inexact, Come list to my Lay that I sing to-day, and choose betwixt him and me, And choosing show that ye always know the Lie from the Veritee! —The ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... pain. He could not forget. But that was not the worst. Had he met Father Beron in the street after all these years Dr. Monygham was sure he would have quailed before him. This contingency was not to be feared now. Father Beron was dead; but the sickening certitude prevented Dr. Monygham from looking anybody ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... I was shivering—not so much with cold as with excitement. You will readily understand that all my faculties were now on the qui vive. Somehow or other during the wearisome drive by the side of my close-tongued companion my mind had fastened on the certitude that my adventure of this night bore a close connexion to the firm of Fournier Freres and to the English files which were causing so many sleepless nights to M. le ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... there was cheer in it. And presently a voice clear, whispering, low, With pitifulness that faltered, spoke to me. Was I, it asked, true son of Mother Church? Coldly I answer'd 'Ay;' then blessed words That danced into mine ears more excellent Music than wedding bells had been were said, With certitude that I might see my maid, My dear one. He would give a paper, he The man beside me. 'Do thy best endeavour, Dear youth. Thy maiden being a right sweet child Surely will hearken to thee; an she do, And will recant, fair faultless heretic, Whose knowledge is but scant of matters ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... pair of pagans of old alluding decently to the domesticated gods. They never knew— at least Stransom never knew—how they had learned to be sure about each other. If it had been with each a question of what the other was there for, the certitude had come in some fine way of its own. Any faith, after all, has the instinct of propagation, and it was as natural as it was beautiful that they should have taken pleasure on the spot in the imagination of a following. ...
— The Altar of the Dead • Henry James
... are established. Yes, but is this non-ego really what it seems? It is; granted; but what is it and can we know what it is? Not without doubt, and here scepticism is unshakable; but in that there is certitude of the existence of the non-ego, the presumption is that we can know it, partially, relatively, very relatively, while we remain infinitely distant from an absolute knowledge, which would be divine. Therefore let us observe and experiment; let us make the "history" ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... curious private memoir of Talleyrand says: "J'ai la certitude que Berlin est le lieu, ou le traite du 26 Vendemiaire (the reconciliation of Austria with France at Campo Formio), aura jette le plus d'etonnement, d'embarras et de orainte." He then explains that, ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... her as she thrilled, loved her more and more as she loved. Moore must have written words of enchantment. Wade's hungry heart suffered a pang of jealousy, but would not harbor it. He read in her perusal of that letter what no other dreamed of, not even the girl herself; and it was certitude of tragic and brief life for her if she could not live for Wilson Moore. Those moments of watching her were unutterably precious to Wade. He saw how some divine guidance had directed his footsteps to this home. ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... with a solicitude that seemed at once pained and tender. And there was something about Amanda, a kind of hard brightness, an impartiality and an air of something undefinably suspended, that gave Benham an intuitive certitude that that afternoon Sir Philip would be spoken to privately, and that then he would pack up and go away in a state of illumination from Chexington. But before he could be spoken to he contrived to speak ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... roots. Moral law dominates man, whether he respects or defies it. See how it is in every-day life: each one is ready to cast his stone at him who neglects a plain duty, even if he allege that he has not yet arrived at philosophic certitude. Everybody will say to him, and with excellent reason: "Sir, we are men before everything. First play your part, do your duty as citizen, father, son; after that you shall return to the course ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... he not by some magical metamorphosis turn these probabilities into a certainty? No; he simply claimed that they were sufficient to produce certitude, which is a different matter. Certitude, he held, was a quality or habit of mind; certainty, a quality of propositions; and probabilities that did not reach to logical certainty might suffice for a mental certitude. We are mentally sure almost every day of many things which ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... to the bedroom because she considered that her mother had been demanding handkerchiefs at a stage too early in the progress of the disease. Impossible that her mother should have come to the end of her own handkerchiefs! She knew with all the certitude of her omniscience that numerous clean handkerchiefs must be concealed somewhere in the untidiness of ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... in favour of the scheme; it required that she should say much, for the schoolmaster was not to be easily persuaded. She had, however, three strong arguments in its favour, which she reiterated again and again, with more and more assurance of certitude as she warmed to the subject. The first point was, that if he did not marry, he must either starve at home or go to the boarding-house, and at the latter place she assured him again, as she had done at first, he would probably soon die. Her second point was, that no one ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... little reproach disguises the certitude that Caroline wishes to enjoy respecting the serious matters which Adolphe wishes to conceal. Adolphe then undertakes to narrate how he has spent the day. Caroline affects a sort of distraction sufficiently well played to induce the belief that ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... impiety?" The monks then lived without the walls, and could not be included by him: nor probably the clergy, deaconesses, or others particularly consecrated to a devout life; as appears from his invective. Nor does he speak this with any certitude, but from his private apprehension by comparing the lives of the generality of the people with the severe maxims of the gospel. This is manifest from the proof he draws from the manners of the people, and from a like ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... behind who enter there: One certitude while sane they cannot leave, One anodyne for torture and despair; 80 The certitude of Death, which no reprieve Can put off long; and which, divinely tender, But waits the outstretched hand to promptly render That draught whose ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... primitive and confiding belief in the testimony of the senses, is beginning to be left out in the cold, when men like Sir W. R. Grove turn round on him and tell him that "the principle of all certitude" is not and cannot be the testimony of his own senses; that these senses, indeed, are no absolute tests of phenomena at all; that probably man is surrounded by beings he can neither see, feel, hear, nor smell; and that, notwithstanding ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... reduce to naught the interested doubts of La Rochefoucauld and the passionate denials of the chief of the Fronde, the very clever but very little truthful Cardinal de Retz, the most ardent and most obstinate of Mazarin's enemies? It would seem, indeed, either that there is no certitude whatever in history, or that it must be considered henceforth as a point absolutely demonstrated that there was a project determined upon to kill Mazarin; that that project had been conceived by Madame de Chevreuse, and in some sort imposed by her upon Beaufort with the aid of Madame de ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... countess, and before she addressed me I had beguiled our sorry interval by finding in her a vague recall of the opening of some novel of Madame Sand. It didn't make her more fathomable to pass in a few minutes from this to the certitude that she was American; it simply engendered depressing reflexions as to the possible check to contributions from Boston. She asked me if, as a person apparently more initiated, I would recommend further waiting, ...
— The Coxon Fund • Henry James
... end in view he went down to Little Deeping. His conviction that the Twins were responsible for the disappearance of the princess became certitude when he learned from Mrs. Dangerfield that they were encamped on Deeping Knoll, and had been there since the day before that disappearance. But he kept that certitude to himself, since it was his habit to do things in ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... their sphynx-like riddle, to establish some plausible relation between them, to erect a logical scheme of things. Primitive man, as Worringer demonstrates in his "Form Problems of the Gothic," strove to achieve something of certitude and fixity through the crude but definite lines and forms of neolithic art. Classical man brought into play the vigour and subtlety and ingenuity of intellect in its primal and most dynamic form, expressed ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... enlivened last night by a squabble on the Hill and Sheil business[9] (dragged on by O'Connell), and the ultimate arrest of Althorp and Sheil by the Serjeant-at-arms, a very foolish affair, which must end as it began, in much declaiming and swearing, and no positive conviction, though complete moral certitude. It afforded much amusement, as everything personal does. The present expectation is that the session will go ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... that actually I do live under the obedience and under the conditions which are evidences of adoption and spiritual filiation; then, so long as I see these marks and live so, I may safely comfort myself in a holy certitude and a modest infallibility of my adoption. Christ determines himself in that, the purpose of God was manifest to him; Saint Peter and Saint Paul determine themselves in those two ways of knowing the purpose of God, the word of God before the execution of the decree in the fulness of time. ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... Survey'd her part by part, and sought to find The ten-horn'd monster in the harmless Hind, Such as the Wolf and Panther had design'd. They thought at first they dream'd; for 'twas offence With them to question certitude of sense, 540 Their guide in faith: but nearer when they drew, And had the faultless object full in view, Lord, how they all admired her heavenly hue! Some, who before her fellowship disdain'd, Scarce, and but scarce, from in-born rage restrain'd, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... city and in his own prowess, which nothing can daunt. He is convinced, especially if he has never travelled beyond his own borders, that he engrosses the virtue and intelligence of the world The driver of a motor-car assured me, with a quiet certitude which brooked no contradiction, that England was cut up into sporting estates for the "lords," and that there the working man was doomed to an idle servility. "But," said he, "there is no room for ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... after a hasty toilet with a handful of snow, the party set off shortly before sunrise. Ralph by general consent assumed the leadership. Taking careful soundings with his ice-axe and using his crampons with almost uncanny certitude, he guided his companions through a moraine and debouched on to a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 5th, 1914 • Various
... rate of discount. What, therefore, was the ancient philosopher to do? His reflections concerning the past must of necessity be partial; how much more would his anticipations of the future fail of anything like demonstrative certitude! ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... saw in the system of Christ, as popularised and interpreted, a whole host of insecure assumptions, unverified assertions, and even degrading traditions, yet he could not doubt of the Divine force of the central message. If he was not in a position to affirm with certitude the truth of the recorded events which attended the origin of the Christian revelation, he could yet affirm with confidence that in the teaching of Christ a higher range of emotion had been reached than had ever been approached ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... moral and spiritual truth is essentially impossible to man. What God reveals to us, he reveals within, through the medium of our moral and spiritual senses. External teaching may be a training of those senses, but affords no foundation for certitude." ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... toryism was as openly professed as whiggism itself: however, at that time I believed that all good Americans were united together; that the confidence of congress in you was unbounded. Then I entertained the certitude that America would be independent in case she should not lose you. Take away, for an instant, that modest diffidence of yourself, (which, pardon my freedom, my dear General, is sometimes too great, and ...
— Memoirs, Correspondence and Manuscripts of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... God, in man, in goodness, as against the pessimist outlook of the day, Gilbert, as we have seen, felt profound certitude. That his outlook was one that held him back from many fields of opportunity he was already partly conscious. A fragment of a letter to Frances expresses ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... to otherwhat than that which thou seest me; wherefore, albeit every one else is mighty well pleased with him, I for my part have little cause to thank him.' These words afforded Mithridanes some hope of availing with more certitude and more safety to give effect to his perverse design, and Nathan very courteously asking him who he was and what occasion brought him into those parts and proffering him his advice and assistance insomuch as lay in ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... a lie." Willa's tones rang out without passion but clarion clear in her absolute certitude. "Anyone who knew Dad ever so slightly would testify to its falseness. Why did he not keep himself informed of my grandfather's changing attitude and come forward and claim the inheritance when the search ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... faintest glimmer of artificial light flickering in the depths of its silent heart. So faint was it, at the distance, that, for a while, doubt prevailed. Then conviction supervened as each of the watchers recorded his observation and a sigh of certitude made itself heard. The point of light was held by all. It was dwelt upon. It was the verification needed to convey absolute faith in the woman's ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... ridicule, the scenes at home,—to go through it all, just for the idea, and yet be alone here, just as I was before, without my husband after all,—with none of the good of him,"—and here Georgina looked at her hostess as if with the certitude that such an enumeration of inconveniences would touch her effectually,—"really, Mrs. Portico, I am bound to say I don't think that would be worth while; I haven't ...
— Georgina's Reasons • Henry James
... Catherine's boudoir, a room of which we are about to speak, is the last remaining relic of the rich decorations accumulated by five artistic kings. Making our way through the labyrinth of chambers, halls, stairways, towers, we may say to ourselves with solemn certitude: "Here Mary Stuart cajoled her husband on behalf of the Guises." "There, the Guises insulted Catherine." "Later, at that very spot the second Balafre fell beneath the daggers of the avengers of the ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... father, seeking to depress her will, Withheld and would not send it; but at length Word being brought her that the child indeed No longer suffered, nor desired the breast, Her peace returned, and, giving thanks to God, All were united in new bonds of hope. Now being fixed in certitude of death, We stripped our souls of all their earthly gear, The useless raiment of this world; and thus, Striving together with a single will, In daily increment of faith and power, We were much comforted by heavenly dreams, ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... of Madrefaba and measure the water on the bar, and Manuel da Ponte, Overseer of Works, and Joao de la Ponte, his brother, who understood it well, to view the land, and if there were stone, and if lime could be made for the work, and to bring him certitude ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... excursion into the country to see the old butler. Well—her letter is still lying there. It has not been called for. Ergo, this town is not his usual abode. Personally, I never thought it was. But he cannot fail to turn up some time or other. Our main hope lies just in the certitude that he must come to town sooner or later. Remember he doesn't know that the butler is dead, and he will want to inquire for a letter. Well, he'll find a note ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... most important of truths the times are ripe; the world is filled with the saddest of memories, with gloom, forebodings and fear. Without the truth in this matter, there can be no rational hope—history must go on in its dismal course; but with the truth, there is not only hope but certitude that the old order has passed and that humanity's manhood dates from the present day. That I have here presented the truth in this matter—the true conception of the human class of life—I have personally no doubt; and I have ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... determined to examine this matter, just to see what certitude there can be on this point; and I shall divide this Dissertation into four parts. In the first, I shall speak of good angels; in the second, of the appearance of bad angels; in the third, of the apparitions of souls of the dead; and in the fourth, of the appearance of living men to others living, ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... new music in the hearts of thousands. His creative mind repeated, in a new form, Butler's two principles: that material phenomena are the types and instruments of real things unseen; and that, in religious certitude, faith and love give to probability a force which it has not ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... persevered. His face was like a skull, his voice scarce recognisable; the dullest of men and officers (it seemed) must have remarked that telltale countenance and broken utterance. And still he persevered, bent upon certitude. ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... sovereignty of virtue and the immutability of justice. He sought to delineate and enforce the practical duties of life. His great object was the elucidation of morals; and he was the first to teach ethics systematically from the immutable principles of moral obligation. Moral certitude was the lofty platform from which he surveyed the world, and upon which, as a rock, he rested in the storms of life. Thus he was a reformer and a moralist. It was his ethical doctrines which were most antagonistic to the age and the least appreciated. He was a profoundly religious man, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... aimed, like the great thinkers of earlier times, to gain a general view of the universe of being; but had sought it by a different mode. Caring rather for certitude of method, reality in the highest principles, than for results attained, he had seen that a knowledge of being must rest on a knowledge of the consciousness which tells us of being. His principle, "Cogito, ergo sum," is the expression ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... obligation before having put our finger on its deep-hidden roots. Moral law dominates man, whether he respects or defies it. See how it is in every-day life: each one is ready to cast his stone at him who neglects a plain duty, even if he allege that he has not yet arrived at philosophic certitude. Everybody will say to him, and with excellent reason: "Sir, we are men before everything. First play your part, do your duty as citizen, father, son; after that you shall return to ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... Christ, as popularised and interpreted, a whole host of insecure assumptions, unverified assertions, and even degrading traditions, yet he could not doubt of the Divine force of the central message. If he was not in a position to affirm with certitude the truth of the recorded events which attended the origin of the Christian revelation, he could yet affirm with confidence that in the teaching of Christ a higher range of emotion had been reached than had ever ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... returning certitude there returned, too, the ambition which she had always nurtured ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... well we could not thus realize all our hopes, that we should often be forced, for lack of knowledge, to employ undesirable methods; but a certitude would sustain us in our efforts—namely, that even without reaching our aim completely we should do more and better in our still imperfect work than the present school accomplishes. I like the free spontaneity of ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... mes amis qui l'ont vu luy trouve beaucoup d'esprit et un tres grand sens; il ne parle gueres que des choses sur lesquelles on l'interroge; il les dit en tres-peu de mots et tres-bien circonstancies; il distingue parfaitement ce qu'il scait avec certitude, de ce qu'il scait avec quelque melange de doute. Il avoue sans aucune facon ne pas savoir ce qu'il ne scait pas, et quoyque je lui aye ouy dire plus de cinq ou six fois les mesme choses a l'occasion ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... A cold angry certitude formed in his being. What a criminal fool he had been! What a blind booby! His only remark, however, brought a puzzled expression to Ettie's troubled countenance. Calvin Stammark exclaimed, "Phebe Braley." He was silent for a little, his frowning gaze ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... humiliation, of exasperation, 'Oh, it's you! Why are you here? If I am so odious to you that you must write to my sister to say so, I give you back your word.' But then, don't you see, it could not have been that. I have the practical certitude that soon afterwards they went together in a hansom to see the ship—as agreed. That was my reason for saying that Flora de ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... first Sin. Not that actuall Death then entred; for Adam then could never have had children; whereas he lived long after, and saw a numerous posterity ere he dyed. But where it is said, "In the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die," it must needs bee meant of his Mortality, and certitude of death. Seeing then Eternall life was lost by Adams forfeiture, in committing sin, he that should cancell that forfeiture was to recover thereby, that Life again. Now Jesus Christ hath satisfied for the sins of all that beleeve in him; and therefore ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... more. Then, in a flash, a thousand mysteries were revealed to her; the past, the present, rushed upon her with a new significance; the delusions of years were abolished, and an extraordinary, an irresistible certitude leapt into being in the light of those blue eyes, the smile of that lovely mouth. The succeeding hours passed in a rapture. She was able to observe a few more details—the "exquisite nose," the "delicate moustachios and slight but very slight whiskers," the "beautiful ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... of an immense plastic production is added the analysis furnished by the written records, we can define with some degree of certitude the place occupied by Wu Tao-tz[)u] in the history of Chinese painting. The books state that the lines from his brush fairly vibrated; all united in marvelling at the spirituality emanating from forms thus defined. He adhered almost exclusively to the use of powerful ink-lines and denied ...
— Chinese Painters - A Critical Study • Raphael Petrucci
... se croit investie du droit absolu d'enseigner les hommes; elle se croit depositaire de la verite, non pas de la verite fragmentaire, incomplete, melee de certitude et d'hesitation, mais de la verite totale, complete, au point de vue religieux. Bien plus, elle est si sure de l'infaillibilite que son Fondateur divin lui a communiquee, comme la dot magnifique de leur indissoluble alliance, que, meme dans l'ordre naturel, scientifique ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... that this condition of things in the coffee industry has passed, and that the practise of telling the coffee story with certitude will soon become general. ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... of the greatest practical importance and validity. By its light we carry on all our affairs, and the success of our action while we rely upon it is the best proof of its truth. The imaginative parsimony and discipline which such a theory involves are balanced by the immense extension and certitude it gives to knowledge. It is at once an act of allegiance to nature and a Magna Charta which mind imposes on the tyrannous world, which in turn pledges itself before the assembled faculties of man not to exceed ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... bring out not only British popular sympathy, but also the certitude that the war was over and the North victorious. But officially the Government had not yet recognized this. Even as early as January, 1865, Seward had returned to the old proposal that the nations of Europe should withdraw ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... and Pole, we can trace every idea and mark every throb. It was the first time that the characters of men were exposed with analytic distinctness; the first time indeed that character could be examined with accuracy and certitude. ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... of civilization. Every movement was supple, slow, and apparently considered. This she did not see nor analyze. She saw only a clothed man with grace of carriage and movement. She felt, rather than perceived, the calm and certitude of all the muscular play of him, and she felt, too, the promise of easement and rest that was especially grateful and craved-for by one who had incessantly, for six days and at top-speed, ironed fancy starch. As the touch of his hand had been good, so, to her, ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... once she got free of her husband, she would indeed be his. That he must hold to. It was Quisante, not she herself, who made her now feel strange to him; and Quisante's spell was not to last; her quiet certitude that her husband's days were numbered carried conviction to him also. "But I won't talk any more about ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... perceptible movement that I was aware of, Mrs. Jones advertised her certitude of knowledge of ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... by this time. These, if ever, are the brave, free days of destroyed landmarks, while the ingenious minds are busy inventing the forms of the new beacons which, it is consoling to think, will be set up presently in the old places. But what is interesting to a writer is the possession of an inward certitude that literary criticism will never die, for man (so variously defined) is, before everything else, a critical animal. And as long as distinguished minds are ready to treat it in the spirit of high adventure literary criticism ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... with ways which all Christian people have open before them? And I am bold to say that the way to be sure of 'the power of God unto salvation' is to submit ourselves continually to its cleansing and renewing influence. This certitude, brethren, may be contributed to by books of apologetics, and by other sources of investigation and study which I should be sorry indeed to be supposed in any degree to depreciate. But the true way to get it is, by deep communion with ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... washed away at last by the ever-encroaching sea. Nay, of its exact situation I am not qualified to tell. I never saw the place, and my knowledge of it is confined to a bald hearsay, albeit of the Deeds that were done within its walls I can affirm the certitude with Truth. From such shadowy accounts as I have collected, the edifice would seem to have consisted but of a single tower or donjon-keep very strong and thick, and defying the lashings of the waves, almost as though it were some Pharos or other guide to ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... pleases more than it annoys, and there can be few Germans who are not flattered by it. That the lower classes have an even more tremendous grievance against the upper classes in Germany than in England or France is a certitude. But the existence and power of the army are their reward, their sole reward, for all that they have suffered in hardship and humiliation at the hands of the autocracy. It is the autocracy's ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... seeker after truth. Reason, for him, is a serviceable weapon of attack or defence, but he is like a man fighting with magic impenetrable armour. He enjoys a bout of logical fence; but it will decide nothing for him: his 'certitude' is independent of it. It is easy to see that such an attitude must appear profoundly dishonest to any man who accepts Locke's maxim about truth-seeking. It is equally easy to see that Newman would spurn the charge of dishonesty as ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... knows all about me, and if she did not, she would set spies to discover all; for suspicion with such women as that is certitude! Listen, Pauline, moments now are precious. It was Madame de Grandchamp who brought ...
— The Stepmother, A Drama in Five Acts • Honore De Balzac
... order to deal with that deepest need of your heart. Nothing but the King's own sign-manual on the pardon makes it valid; and unless you and I can, somehow or other, come to close grips with God, and get into actual contact with Him, and hear, somehow, with infallible certitude, as from His own lips, the assurance of forgiveness, there is not ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... rumours it was stated with every accent of certitude that Madame Markievicz had been captured in George's Street, and taken to the Castle. It was also current that Sir Roger Casement had been captured at sea and had already been shot in the Tower of London. The names of several Volunteer Leaders are mentioned as being ...
— The Insurrection in Dublin • James Stephens
... Butler. Both of them, after a fashion, accept Butler's famous saying that 'probability is the guide of life.' Newman, believing in the necessity of dogma, holds that we are justified in transmuting the belief corresponding to probability into such 'certitude' as corresponds to demonstration. He does so by the help of appeals to our conscience, which, for the reasons just given, fail to have any force for his opponent. Fitzjames adhered steadily to Butler's doctrine. There is, he says, a probability of the truth of the great religious doctrines—of the ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... with a greater frankness than I had used in Anticipations, and came out of that second effort guilty of much rash writing, but with a considerable development of formed opinion. In many matters I had shaped out at last a certain personal certitude, upon which I feel I shall go for the rest of my days. In this present book I have tried to settle accounts with a number of issues left over or opened up by its two predecessors, to correct them in some particulars, and to give the general ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... — N. certainty; necessity &c. 601; certitude, surety, assurance; dead certainty, moral certainty; infallibleness &c. adj.; infallibility, reliability; indubitableness, inevitableness, unquestionableness[obs3]. gospel, scripture, church, pope, court of final appeal; res judicata[Lat], ultimatum positiveness; dogmatism, dogmatist, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... could do, he could. It became a nightmare chant, and he gibbered it to those that passed him on the trail. At other times, resting, he watched and envied the stolid, mule-footed Indians that plodded by under heavier packs. They never seemed to rest, but went on and on with a steadiness and certitude that were to ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... more conscious of those bleibende Verhaeltnisse, more and more capable of living in the whole; also that, in proportion as we gain a firmer hold upon our own place in the world, we shall come to comprehend with more instinctive certitude what is simple, natural, and honest, welcoming with gladness all artistic products that exhibit these qualities. The perception of the enlightened man will then be the taste of a healthy person who has made himself acquainted with the laws of evolution ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... the inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme power has fashioned the natures of women." But as there is not "one level of feminine incompetence as strict as the ability to count three and no more, the social lot of woman cannot be treated with scientific certitude." It is treated with a dissective delineation in the women of George Eliot unequalled ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... pointed out to him that the doors of Paradise were open wide. Mr. Snyder, as Henry perceived, was apt unwittingly to give the impression that he, and not his clients, earned the wealth upon which he received ten per cent. commission. But Henry was not for a single instant blind to the certitude that, if his next book realized two thousand pounds, the credit would be due to himself, and to no other person whatever. Henry might be tongue-tied in front of Mark Snyder, but he was capable of estimating with some precision their relative fundamental importance ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... should know life sympathetically is of practical importance; for otherwise we shall not know how to change it or indeed that it ought to be changed at all. Only by knowing other ways of life can we be certain of the relative worth of our own way; knowledge alone gives certitude. Without knowledge we run the risk of becoming ruthless destroyers of things which an intelligent sympathy might well preserve and find a place ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... for the placing of heavy guns in concealed positions. In addition they perfected the mobility of even the heaviest of pieces, so that it became impossible for observation from the Franco-British ships or from aeroplanes to locate them with any certitude. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... intrusive insignificances of this fleeting present? Have you Him as your continual Companion? Oh! when we contrast the difference between the largeness of this promise—a promise of a thrilling consciousness of His presence, of a vivid perception of His character, of an unwavering certitude of His reality—and the fly-away glimpses and wandering sight, and faint, far-off views, as of a planet weltering amid clouds, which the most of Christian men have of Christ, what shame should cover our faces, and how we should feel that if ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... was enthusiasm for this one purpose that sustained him in his great work. Its object was to harmonize the present use of the language with the past usage, in order that the present usage may possess all the fullness, richness, and certitude which it can have, and which naturally belong to it. His words are: 'Avant tout, et pour ramener ['a] une id['e]e m['e]re ce qui va [^e]tre expliqu['e] dans la Pr['e]face, je dirai, d['e]finissant ce dictionnaire, qu'il embrasse et combine l'usage pr['e]sent de la langue ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... sense of enfeebled powers, and a vague determination to universal distrust and suspicion. Suddenly he felt himself vibrating to loud tones, which seemed like the thundering echo of his own passion. A voice that penetrated his very marrow with its accent of triumphant certitude was saying—"The day of vengeance is ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... be faithless to that vision of the highest, that wonderful unknown woman of the apocalyptic moorland, whose face Sylvia had not even momentarily banished from my dreams, and whom, with an unaccountable certitude, I still believed to be the woman God had destined for me; but, all things considered, Sylvia was surely as pretty an answer to prayer as a man could reasonably hope for. Many historic vows had met with ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... precepts in Revelation; to those who recognised the impossibility of accepting the varying voices of Intuition as a moral guide; to all those the theory that Morality was based on Utility, came as a welcome and rational relief. It promised a scientific certitude to moral precepts; it left the intellect free to inquire and to challenge; it threw man back on grounds which were found in this world alone, and could be tested by reason and experience; it derived no authority ...
— The Basis of Morality • Annie Besant
... chooser for the group; religion is an established system of choices even in its "Thou shalt not" injunctions, and to be at one with God implies that one is following an infallible leader, and doubt and uncertainty disappear. Trotter[1] points out clearly the role the feeling of certitude plays in developing codes. As life becomes more complex, as more choices appear, the need of an established method of choosing becomes greater. The careful, cautious, conscientious types develop ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... sharing of a beautiful secret is the most blest. Thus, for the week following this day of days, Theophil and Isabel went about their daily lives with all heaven in their hearts, and, divided though they were, possessed by a mystical certitude of inner union which they felt no extension of space or endurance of ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... and confiding belief in the testimony of the senses, is beginning to be left out in the cold, when men like Sir W. R. Grove turn round on him and tell him that "the principle of all certitude" is not and cannot be the testimony of his own senses; that these senses, indeed, are no absolute tests of phenomena at all; that probably man is surrounded by beings he can neither see, feel, hear, ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... and hint there aren't others, aren't, weren't and won't be? Blurt out the love, she has suspicion for, so?— why not hitherto?— what brings you bragging now?— and what'll it be hereafter? Defer to the you, she has certitude for, me? thanks, lad!— but why argue about it?— or fancy I'm lonesome?— do I look as though you had to? And having determined how you'll say it, you had next best ascertain whom it is that you say it to. That you're sure she's the one, that there'll never be another, never ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... De Ente Supernaturali, disp. 30. Under these circumstances Suarez was justified in saying, in regard to the degree of certitude to be attributed to this teaching: "Si quis negaret gratiam sanctificantem esse habitum, licet esse temere dictum, non posset tamen ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... for'ard along the main deck, I could see the wretched sailors, whenever they were given some task of pull and haul, wet through and through by the boarding seas. Several times I saw some of them taken off their feet and rolled about in the creaming foam. And yet, erect, unstaggering, with certitude of weight and strength, among these rolled men, these clutching, cowering ones, moved either Mr. Pike or Mr. Mellaire. They were never taken off their feet. They never shrank away from a splash of spray or heavier bulk of down-falling water. They had fed on different food, were informed with ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... to breathe throughout her entire being an affirmation of her celestial dependency. She could catch no words, merely a vague, immaterial destiny like distant music; and her ears filled with a wailing certitude of an inseverable affinity with the stars, and she longed to put off this shameful garb of flesh and rise to her spiritual destiny of which the stars are our watchful guardians. It was like deep music; ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... friend, let us be true To one another! For the world which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant ...
— For Auld Lang Syne • Ray Woodward
... honour, from the highest, which are almost godlike, to the simplest, the most elementary, which still belong to the lower worlds. There is no longer any doubt on this point: it has been proved over and over again until we have attained a final certitude. ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... wore along he came into valleys or swales where game was more plentiful. A band of caribou passed by, twenty and odd animals, tantalizingly within rifle range. He felt a wild desire to run after them, a certitude that he could run them down. A black fox came toward him, carrying a ptarmigan in his mouth. The man shouted. It was a fearful cry, but the fox, leaping away in fright, did not drop ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... Charles did immediately enjoy his conquest. If it be noted that the Duke of Richmond only came into the world in 1672, we may be led to suppose that Mademoiselle Querouaille did not yield without hesitation to the desires of her royal lover; and that supposition becomes almost a certitude, when one reads this passage of a letter which Saint-Evremond addressed to his ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... sympathetically. "Perhaps manage hook it somehow, and meanwhile make best of bad business and have high old time. You see you want to come Asiki-land, though I tell you it rum place, and," he added with certitude and a circular sweep of his hand, "by Jingo! you here now and I daresay they give you all the ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... The official placards, the trash in the journals, inspired him with immense disgust, for they had never lied so boldly or flattered the people with so much low meanness. It was with a despairing heart and the certitude of final disaster that Amedee, needing a little sleep after the fatigue, wandered through Paris's obscure streets, barely lighted here and there by petroleum lamps, under the dark, opaque winter sky, where the echoes of the distant ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... a structure is the foundation. And Paul was narrow enough to believe that the one foundation upon which a human spirit could be built up into a hallowed character is Jesus Christ. He is the basis of all our certitude. He is the anchor for all our hopes. To Him should be referred all our actions; for Him and by Him our lives should be lived. On Him should rest, solid and inexpugnable, standing four-square to all the winds that blow, the fabric of our ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... and groom with fairly fascinated eyes, but from a certain distance. They had been nice, they had thanked her handsomely for her handsome present, but nothing could modify her regretful certitude that Brenda did not care for her. And it might so easily have been she and not the good Aunt Brenda who secured for the sposo his career of silver lace and sabre.... And Brenda, innocently unknowing, would just the same not ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... power, but falls into the undistinguished mass of human mortality. Bewildered as the disciples were, that assurance of resurrection had little present force, but even then would faintly hint at some comfort and blessed mystery. What was to them a nebulous hope is to us a sun of certitude and cheer, 'Christ that died' is no gospel until you go on to say, 'Yea, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... of the masters whose influence left a trace upon my character to this very day, combined a fierceness of conception with a certitude of execution upon the basis of just appreciation of means and ends which is the highest quality of the man of action. And an artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... Jean-Marie, a little masterpiece by Andre Theuriet, which had the most brilliant success. Porel played the part of Jean-Marie. He was at that time slender, and full of hope. Since then his slenderness has developed into plumpness and his hope into certitude. ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... touching the sacred soil which I had taken so long to reach, and I longed to be able to drink its health; but though I had gone, I suppose, ten miles, and though the heat was increasing, I would not stop; for I remembered the two francs, and my former certitude of reaching Milan was shaking and crumbling. The great heat of midday would soon be on me, I had yet nearly thirty miles to go, and my bad night ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... and carried out a journey of forty-two days in my room. The interesting observations I have made, and the continual pleasure I have felt during this long expedition, excited in me the wish to publish it; the certitude of the usefulness of my work decided me. My heart is filled with an inexpressible satisfaction when I think of the infinite number of unhappy persons to whom I am now able to offer an assured resource ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... himself more unpleasant than he does," she said, in a tone of quiet certitude and utter indifference. "But why shouldn't I have tea with you in the pavilion? It's what ...
— The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson
... again respire Where men saw nought that was or was to be, Save only death imperial. Thou and he Who has the heart of all men's hearts for lyre, Ye twain, being great of spirit as time is great, And sure of sight as truth's own heavenward eye, Beheld the forms of forces passing by And certitude of equal-balanced fate, Whose breath forefelt makes darkness palpitate, And knew that light should live and ...
— A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... which the Christian theologians had fashioned a number of moral truths when they annexed the house of human morality. But what is the basis of certitude on which these interpretations rest? If Adam was not an historical character, if the story of the Fall be whittled down into a "type" which is typical of no underlying reality, the basis of Pauline theology is shaken, and practical deductions drawn from it are shaken also. In fact, "the Demonology ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... sometimes produce the most surprizing effects. Besides altho the vivacity and force of imagination be easily admitted into the relations of the Languages, and leaves there forcible impressions, yet it neither warrants certitude, nor dislodgeth confusion; 'tis reason alone that establisheth the mind in its cognizances, and credits all its conceptions with order, tis that alone which perfects the combination of all their relations and agreements according to the naturall connexion which they have with the same principles ...
— A Philosophicall Essay for the Reunion of the Languages - Or, The Art of Knowing All by the Mastery of One • Pierre Besnier
... is my system false, but all philosophy is impossible; since the only ground of certitude—our consciousness—is pronounced unstable, our only means of knowing the ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... of reality. If I evoke a reminiscence and dwell attentively on the details, I have the impression that I am in face of the reality itself. "I feel as if I were there still," is a common saying; and, among the recollections I evoke, there are some which give me the same certitude as the perception of the moment. Certain witnesses would write their depositions with their blood. One does not see this every day; but still ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... it was done, that is alone of moment; and it may be no great matter from a cosmical standpoint, if in other qualities of character he was singularly defective—if indeed he were hypocrite, adulterer, eccentric, or lunatic.... Home we come again, then, to the old and last resort of certitude—namely the common assent of mankind, or of the competent by instruction ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... Rochefoucauld and the passionate denials of the chief of the Fronde, the very clever but very little truthful Cardinal de Retz, the most ardent and most obstinate of Mazarin's enemies? It would seem, indeed, either that there is no certitude whatever in history, or that it must be considered henceforth as a point absolutely demonstrated that there was a project determined upon to kill Mazarin; that that project had been conceived by Madame de Chevreuse, and in some sort imposed by her upon Beaufort with the aid of Madame ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... to our Vice-Chairman. In fact, sir, during the last year or so of his life, when Mr. Farrell took his strange fancy for foreign parts, it seemed to us—well, it seemed to us that, in his strange condition of mind, anything might happen. To this day, sir, we haven't what you might call any certitude of his demise. It is not, up to this moment, legally proven—as they say. Our last letter from him was dated from far up the coast—from a place called San Ramon, which I understand to be in Peru. In it he announced ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... wonder sometimes if the two shadows I cast, one with a sort of feminine faintness with regard to the other and not quite so tall, may not have suggested the word or the thought of an assignation to my mind. All that I have clear is that with the certitude of intuition I knew what it was that had brought the youth in evening dress outside the shrubbery. Of course! He ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... problems, the solution of which does not involve its own abdication—for universal suffrage may do everything except abdicate; submit these things to it and it will solve them, not without error, perhaps, but with the grand total of certitude that appertains to human sovereignty; it will solve them masterfully. Now, put to it the question whether John or Peter did well or ill in stealing an apple from an orchard. At that, it halts; it is at fault. Why? Is it because this question is on a lower plane? No: it is because ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... is likely, however, to be early outgrown. As the difficulties in the way of his finding a God worthy of his adoration become manifest to him, it may be, indeed, with a sigh that he turns from the conventional religion in which so many men find certitude and place. This is the mood, frequently, of Browning, [Footnote: See Christmas Eve and Easter Day.] of Tennyson, [Footnote: See In Memoriam.] of Arnold, [Footnote: See Dover Beach.] of Clough. [Footnote: See The New ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... the hope, belief, and certitude My wife to me was faithful evermore, Should with contempt the beauty have eschewed Of that famed daughter which fair Leda bore; And all the wit and wealth wherewith was wooed The illustrious shepherd upon Ida ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... discount. What, therefore, was the ancient philosopher to do? His reflections concerning the past must of necessity be partial; how much more would his anticipations of the future fail of anything like demonstrative certitude! ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... mesure que je montais l'escalier, ma certitude devenait plus grande: secrtaire du sous-prfet; je ne me sentais pas ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... ill-disguised admiration for the actress!—his abrupt reappearance the night of the temperance drama! Any uncertainty Saint-Prosper might have felt regarding the identity of him he sought, or the reason for that day's work, now became compelling certitude. But for the tenants, he might have ridden by the old patroon house. As it was, congratulating himself upon this accidental meeting rather than his own shrewdness, he quickly dismounted. A moment's thought, and he ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... trial draws near I send you all my love. I can do no more. We are probably called upon to make such a sacrifice as forbids us to dwell upon our ties. Let us pray that the certitude of Goodness and Beauty may not ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... conclusion that God exists, and from the existence of a good and wise supreme Being who has given men reason, sense, and perception in order to acquire knowledge, he argued that these faculties cannot lead men into error, and that consequently the veracity of God was the ultimate basis of certitude. ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... years in perpetuity; but only during one natural day; from one evening including the night, to the evening of the following day." At these words Francis humbly bowed down his head. As he went away, the Pope asked him: "Whither art thou going, simple man? What certitude hast thou of what thou hast just been granted?" "Holy Father," he replied, "your word is sufficient for me. If this indulgence is the work of God, He will make it manifest. Let Jesus Christ and His Blessed Mother, and the angels, be the notary, on this occasion, the paper, ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... dogs from the shelter of the rock into the teeth of the storm. Then, turning, they fled south before the gale with what certitude they might. They had nothing to guide them, neither stars nor brilliant aurora, and they struggled along the heavy trail only by their memories of it, and the exercise of every particle of ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... consumptive lads, and wretched slaves, whose hearts were caught not by axes and blankets, but by the message of a Father's love and of a home beyond the stars. The Maori was a religious being, and when his old faith failed him in the hour of need, he turned to the new gospel of certitude and hope. Nobler spirits among the race were drawn also by the social side of the new teaching; they saw in it a prospect of ridding the land of desolating wars; but in each case it was the true power of Christianity that operated, not the adventitious blessings ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... wiped out some celebrated opponent, I for one never feel anything offensive in the tone, but, indeed, only the unmistakable intonation of a friend's voice. But I have noticed among younger, harder, and much shallower men a certain disposition to ape this insolent ease and certitude, and that without any fundamental frankness or mirth. So far the influence is bad. Egoism can be learnt as a lesson like any other "ism." It is not so easy to learn an Irish accent or a good temper. ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... in view he went down to Little Deeping. His conviction that the Twins were responsible for the disappearance of the princess became certitude when he learned from Mrs. Dangerfield that they were encamped on Deeping Knoll, and had been there since the day before that disappearance. But he kept that certitude to himself, since it was his habit to do things ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... family, she never knew what to expect from this troublesome, adorable, disturbing mystery called Eleanor. She worshiped her with the solicitous, over-anxious care that saw fever in the healthy flush of youth, regarded a sneeze as premonitory of consumption, and waited with dark certitude for the "something dreadful" that instinct told her was ever about to happen ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... of mind to accomplish, and one final step to take. That further advance of mind was to be able honestly to say that I was certain of the conclusions at which I had already arrived. That further step, imperative when, such certitude was attained, was my ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... had upon HIM? It was very simple; he despised her; she had no traditions and the moral horizon of a Unitarian minister. Poor Isabel, who had never been able to understand Unitarianism! This was the certitude she had been living with now for a time that she had ceased to measure. What was coming—what was before them? That was her constant question. What would he do—what ought SHE to do? When a man hated his wife what did it lead to? She didn't hate him, that she was sure of, for every little while ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... soul. This seemed so different to any other parting, that had perforce been during the past year. The presence of Chauvelin in her house, the obvious planning of this departure for France, had filled her with a foreboding, nay, almost a certitude of a ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... remembering Gethsemane, Will answer softly, 'It was known to Me.' God's alchemist, old Time, will merge to calm That bitter anguish; but there is no balm Save the sweet certitude that each long day Is one step in a stair That circles up to where ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... everlasting hell who though in possession of wealth, never giveth away nor enjoyeth himself from avarice, saying, he hath none.' The Yaksha asked,—'By what, O king, birth, behaviour, study, or learning doth a person become a Brahmana? Tell us with certitude!' Yudhishthira answered,—'Listen, O Yaksha! It is neither birth, nor study, nor learning, that is the cause of Brahmanahood, without doubt, it is behaviour that constitutes it. One's behaviour should always be well-guarded, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... certainly was very much worn and used looking in her decline. Not even the faded remnants of an earlier grace or gentility helped to redeem the weak points of nature about her. She was a stranger to me, and yet I could have declared with the most perfect sanction of my moral certitude that she was the direct descendant of a plebeian stock. Not but that she had counterfeited patrician attributes according to her own interpretation of them as earnestly as she knew how; but such, empty pretensions as these are too transparent ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... which are not ourselves, so that coincidently the ego and the non-ego are established. Yes, but is this non-ego really what it seems? It is; granted; but what is it and can we know what it is? Not without doubt, and here scepticism is unshakable; but in that there is certitude of the existence of the non-ego, the presumption is that we can know it, partially, relatively, very relatively, while we remain infinitely distant from an absolute knowledge, which would be divine. Therefore let us observe and experiment; ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... red-headed woman who used to dine at the Ratmort does not lie on a modern bed but on the couch of all time; and she raises herself from amongst her cushions, setting forth her somewhat meagre nudity as arrogantly and with the same calm certitude of her sovereignty as the eternal Venus for whose prey is the flesh of all men born. The introduction of a bouquet bound up in large white paper does not prejudice the symbolic intention, and the picture would do well for an illustration to some poem to be found in "Les fleurs du Mal". ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... desired and foreseen it. Practical, clear-minded, of firm will, imbued with the notion of State, he possessed in the highest degree the qualities his new subjects most lacked. He knew neither doubts nor vain hesitations; he was an optimist, always sure of success: not with the certitude of the blind who walk confidently to the river, but with the assurance of clear-sighted people, who leave the goddess Fortune so little to do, it were a miracle if she did less for them. His lucid and persistent will is never at fault. In the most critical ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... back to the table and the great chair. "You were, of course, as free as any man to travel to Philadelphia or where you would. I heard that you were upon such a journey, and I felt a certitude that you would also visit Washington. Had you done this, I should have received you with the old confidence and affection. I should have listened to the explanation I felt assured you would wish to make. At that time it ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... the white in this respect, he lacks obviously that mental quick-sightedness which, with the latter, defines, as it were, intuitively, the exact location on the field, of a friend, and, with unerring certitude, calculates the degree of force that shall be needed to propel the ball, and the precise direction its flight shall take, in order to insure its reposing on the net of that friend. In the frequently recurring mlees, begotten of the struggle amongst a number of contestants ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... them, but, contrariwise, canst refresh and satiate the thirsty lips of them all? Who art Thou that dost proclaim Thyself as sufficient for the fruition of the mind that yearns for truth and thirsts for certitude, of the parched heart that wearies and cracks for want of love, of the will that longs to be rightly and lovingly commanded? Oh, dear brethren, not only the Titanic presumption of proposing oneself as enough for a single soul, but the inconceivable ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... we would bear unprejudiced witness to the Divine origin of Scripture, we must prove solely on its own authority that it teaches true moral doctrines, for by such means alone can its Divine origin be demonstrated: we have shown that the certitude of the prophets depended chiefly on their having minds turned towards what is just and good, therefore we ought to have proof of their possessing this quality before we repose faith in them. (16) From miracles God's divinity cannot be proved, as I ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part II] • Benedict de Spinoza
... rosier; and as there were several of the bags, and each more or less broken, the powder was spread widely on the floor. Had any of us ever seen giant powder? No, nobody had; and instantly there grew up in my mind a shadowy belief, verging with every moment nearer to certitude, that I had somewhere heard somebody describe it as just such a powder as the one around us. I have learnt since that it is a substance not unlike tallow, and is made up in rolls for all ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... instances; but if not, at all events they may serve to elucidate the main points, and guide to more complete examination of the subject, if it interests him, among the hills themselves. And if, after he has pursued the inquiry long enough to feel the certitude of the laws which I have been endeavoring to illustrate, he turns back again to art, I am well assured it will be with a strange recognition of unconceived excellence, and a newly quickened pleasure in the ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... scientific ideal. Man, Spinoza held, is a part of Nature, and Nature is governed by eternal and immutable laws. It must be just as possible, therefore, to apply the mathematical method to man, as it is to apply it to matter. It must be possible to determine, with the certitude obtainable in the exact sciences, what things are good for man and what means ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... a siccity of devotion as we see in these days, we have a thousand and a thousand colleges that pass it over commodiously enough, expecting every day their dinner from the liberality of Heaven. Secondly, they do not take notice that this certitude upon which they so much rely is not much less uncertain and hazardous than hazard itself. I see misery as near beyond two thousand crowns a year as if it stood close by me; for besides that it is in the ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... ridicule two children who love each other with a passion which is true and pure, because it is founded upon a knowledge of each other's character; on the certitude of their mutual ardor in conquering the difficulties of life; in a word, of two children who will also cherish sincere ...
— Mercadet - A Comedy In Three Acts • Honore De Balzac
... and has a very feeble control over the unruly affections of sinful men. Newman himself resorted to scientific methods in his theory of Development, that is, of the growth and evolution of doctrine. We may agree that these destructive arguments have much logical force, yet on the other hand such certitude as empiricism can provide brings little consolation to the multitude, who require some imperative command; they look for a pillar of cloud or fire to go before them day and night, and a land of promise in the distance. Scientific exposition ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... when we have no certitude. The conscience may have nothing to say concerning the honesty of a cause to which we are about to commit ourselves. This state of uncertainty and perplexity is called doubt. To doubt is to suspend judgment; a dubious conscience is one that ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... was heavier. On my long ride from Antwerp, with the buoyancy of youth, I had passed through all the phases from anguished fear to the almost certitude of hope, and I had entered Paris feeling sure that I would find my father well again when I should reach America. I had entered Paris also joyous with the thought of seeing mademoiselle once more, and ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... as all men are, Jasper loved his vessel—the house of his dreams. He lent to her something of Freya's soul. Her deck was the foothold of their love. The possession of his brig appeased his passion in a soothing certitude ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... others. But such doubts and difficulties will not greatly weaken or disturb us, so long as they are partial, so long as they do not affect the central principles of thought and action, so long as there is still some fixed faith which reaches beyond the disturbance, some certitude which is untouched by the doubt. If, however, we once lose the consciousness that there is any such principle, or if we try to rest on a principle which we at the same time feel to be inadequate, our spiritual life, ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... or danger that she could point to or forecast with certitude. Nevertheless, struggle against it as she might, knowing it for pure psychological phenomena arising out of her harsh environment. Hazel suffered continual vague forebodings. The bald, white peaks seemed to surround her like a prison from which there could be no release. From day to day she ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... again; all the time the plain words, the plain face, the quiet of him stabbed her with daggers of which he had no idea. She was dismayed at the recollection of her talk with her brother the evening before, of the ease and certitude with which she had laid down her conditions, of not giving up her career, of remaining the famous Miss Falbe, of refusing to take a dishonoured place in the sacred circle of the Combers. Now, when she was face to face with his love, so ineloquently expressed, ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... anomaly and contradiction that a lover of science, exact, cautious, intent on certitude, should accept a belief in personal immortality. Still, to others this is regarded as positive proof of his ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... effort, weariness, failure, painfully alternating and recurring, it is an immense relief to the exhausted mind to be able to say, "At length I know that I can know nothing about anything." ... Ignorance remains the evil which it ever was, but something of the peace of certitude is gained in knowing the worst, and in having reconciled the mind to the endurance of it.'[16] Precisely, and what one would say of our own age is that it will not deliberately face this knowledge of the worst. So it misses the peace of certitude, and not only its peace, but ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... liberty is composed of the properties both of religion and of liberty, and one of its factors never became an object of disinterested observation among actual leaders of opinion. They preferred the argument of doubt to the argument of certitude, and sought to defeat intolerance by casting out revelation as they had defeated the persecution of witches by casting out the devil. There remained a flaw in their liberalism, for liberty apart from belief is liberty with ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... now perfected compound has been put off one more day. F is completely calm and confident of the outcome. She is below now, making lastminute preparations. For the first time she has infected me with her certitude—although I never doubted ultimate success—and I feel tomorrow will actually see the beginning of the end for the Grass which started so long ago on Mrs Dinkman's lawn. How far I and the world ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... there arose among the Nepioi all manner of schools and discussions, some saying this and some that, but none with the certitude of old. Their customs fell into disrepute, and even the very professors themselves were occasionally doubted when they laid down the law upon matters in which they alone were competent—as, for instance, when they asserted that the moon was made of a peculiarly delicious edible substance ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... perhaps have been a foreign countess, and before she addressed me I had beguiled our sorry interval by finding in her a vague recall of the opening of some novel of Madame Sand. It didn't make her more fathomable to pass in a few minutes from this to the certitude that she was American; it simply engendered depressing reflexions as to the possible check to contributions from Boston. She asked me if, as a person apparently more initiated, I would recommend further waiting, and I answered that ...
— The Coxon Fund • Henry James
... Luther and Zwingli to meet death, and bear the harshest tortures for their faith. For they run to suffer punishments, no matter how horrible, as if to a banquet; so that if you take that as a test either of the truth of doctrine or of their certitude of grace, you would easily conclude that in no other sect is to be found a faith so true or grace so certain. But as Paul wrote: "Even if I give my body to to be burned and have not charity, it avails me naught. But he has not charity ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... knowledge? These are questions which I cannot answer." He cannot answer a question on which the value of his whole system of physical philosophy depends; uncertain about his own identity, about the evidence of his senses, he would make the latter the sole rule and measure of certitude, and deny to man any higher faculty by which alone he can justify his trust in his cognitive faculties. Another instance of his absolute ignorance of common philosophic terminology is when he asserts that according ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... pendant ces dernieres 3 semaines. La Crise est passee et j'ai tout lieu de croire que le Gouvernement de Sir R. Peel va s'affermir de plus en plus, ce que je ne puis que desirer pour le bien-etre du pays. Je dois cependant dire a votre Majeste que si le Ministere eut change, j'ai la certitude que le nouveau se serait empresse de maintenir, comme nous le desirons si vivement, cette entente cordiale si heureusement ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... hallucinations there is the same objective clearness, the same subjective certitude as in toxic hallucinations; and this clearness, this certitude, may in Jeanne's ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... to certify them of their prophetic imaginings; and for this reason Moses bids the Jews (Deut. xviii.) ask of the prophets a sign, namely, the prediction of some coming event. (16) In this respect, prophetic knowledge is inferior to natural knowledge, which needs no sign, and in itself implies certitude. (17) Moreover, Scripture warrants the statement that the certitude of the prophets was not mathematical, but moral. (18) Moses lays down the punishment of death for the prophet who preaches new gods, even ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part I] • Benedict de Spinoza
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