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More "Self-evident" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in "Pictor Ignotus"—and, by the insertion of a word or sentence in the notice of each, expanded or emphasized the meaning of several of the minor poems. I should have stated in my first Preface, had not the fact appeared to me self-evident, that I owe to Mr. Browning's kindness all the additional matter which my own reading could not supply: such as the index to the Greek names in "Aristophanes' Apology," and the Persian in "Ferishtah's Fancies;" the notes to "Transcendentalism," and "Pietro ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... sole living contemporary witness of his mother's dishonor. Obed Chute himself was certainly the last man in the world, as Gualtier thought, who would have been capable of volunteering such information as that. These conclusions to which he came were natural, and were based on self-evident truths. Yet still the question remained: How was it that these two men, who more than all others were connected with those affairs which most deeply affected himself and Hilda, and from whom he had the chief if not the only reason to fear danger, could now be joined in such intimate friendship? ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... not by any means self-evident upon the face of it that an institution like the liberty of speech is right or just. It is not natural or obvious to let a man utter follies and abominations which you believe to be bad for mankind any more than it is natural or obvious to let a man dig up a part ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... of mankind, either for good or evil; incidentally he throws into marked contrast the despicable depreciation used by the Spanish writers in referring to the Filipinos, making clear the application of the self-evident proposition that no ordinary human being in the presence of superior force can very well conduct himself as a man unless he be ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... pulling it about to find what is inside or search out texts for homilies in defence of our own particular views of life. The world's literature stands unaffected, though Archdeacon Farrar use it for chapter-headings and Sir John Lubbock wield it as a mallet to drive home self-evident truths. ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... nations habitually assume, may perhaps be dismissed with a single citation from the Supreme Court. Said Mr. Justice Bradley, in the Legal Tender Cases: "As a government it [the United States] was invested with all the attributes of sovereignty.... It seems to be a self-evident proposition that it is invested with all those inherent and implied powers which, at the time of adopting the Constitution, were generally considered to belong to every government as such, and as being essential to the exercise of its ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... abruptly to the floor and began to go over the film pages again, comparing her portraits with the portraits of those higher-paid creatures. She hated vanity and could not endure it in other women; it was a mere observation of a self-evident fact that she was prettier than all the other film queens put together. She sat there sneering at the presumptuousness of screen idols whom she had almost literally worshiped a ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... had Turner pointed out to her that the fact was self-evident, that in view of that very fact she should have been less confident in the discussion and should be more guarded in the future: his efforts were crowned with small success. Mrs. Turner's beliefs were only too apt on all occasions to be heralded ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... carrying his breeches upon an enormous long pole, without being laughed at? Can a man of acknowledged ignorance and stupidity, write a tragedy superior to Hamlet? or a genteel comedy superior to the Careless Husband?[40] I need not wait for an answer. No word but no, will do: it is self-evident. No more, my friend, can he who is lost in dissipation, write a letter. I am at present so circumstanced; accept this short line in answer to your last, and write very ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... It is self-evident that "c" cannot be used as often as "b," so the Declarer who likes always to say something will prefer "b," but the bidder who wishes, when he calls, to have distinct value attached to his announcement, will elect in favor of "c" rather than "b," and for the ...
— Auction of To-day • Milton C. Work
... many sad things to consider, and among them the impending loss of this grand mane. After divers delays, and infinitude of forms, and much evidence of things self-evident—in the spirit which drove Sir Horatio Nelson to pin a certificate of amputation to the sleeve of his lost arm—this Twemlow had established that he was the Twemlow left behind upon the coast of Africa, and having been captured in the service of his country, was entitled at least to restoration. ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... in the seat. We hold these truths to be self-evident—that the ratio of sports coats to tuxedos in a faculty member's closet shall determine whether Clearwater gets to do research in solid state physics, whether George Durrant gives his genius to the nation or whether it gets buried in Dr. William ...
— The Great Gray Plague • Raymond F. Jones
... sir, that the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence contains five affirmations, declared to be self-evident truths, which, if truths, do sustain you and all abolitionists in every thing you say as to the right of the negro to liberty; and not only to liberty,—to equality, political and social. But I disagree with you as to their truth, and I say that not one of said affirmations is a self-evident ...
— Slavery Ordained of God • Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
... with one who should deny the definitions and axioms. The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society. And yet they are denied and evaded with no small show of success. One dashingly calls them 'glittering generalities.' Another bluntly calls them 'self-evident lies.' And others insidiously argue that they apply to 'superior races.' These expressions, differing in form, are identical in object and effect—the supplanting the principles of free government, and restoring those of ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... insures the Survival of Beneficial Processes Only.—It is self-evident that wherever there is a saving of labor needed to make a given amount and kind of product, there is an increase in the possible product that is created by the aid of a given amount of labor. If workers themselves get a share of the ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... it in habitual exercise within them; and those who would have the comforting evidence of their being in covenant with God, must feel themselves drawn by his example, frequently to acknowledge themselves as devoted to him. It is self-evident, that every time that the people of God take hold on his Covenant, he, after some manner, makes a covenant with them. Every act of Covenanting, therefore, on the part of the saints of God, and especially on ...
— The Ordinance of Covenanting • John Cunningham
... with a great deal of animation to a man who sat beside her. From his manner and appearance and also from his pronunciation it was self-evident that he was a Frenchman. Moreover, he revealed a certain intellectual distinction typically French. Monsieur Georges Duval was of middle age with clear-cut, aristocratic features, keen dark eyes and iron-gray hair. In comparison with him Mrs. Burton ...
— The Campfire Girls on the Field of Honor • Margaret Vandercook
... supposed in the practice, even by those philosophers who would endeavour to shake it by their empty speculations. The intimate evidence of that truth is like that of the first principles, which want no proof, and which serve themselves as proofs to other truths that are not so clear and self-evident. But how could the First Being make a creature who is himself the umpire ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... therefore, to admit that opinions cannot be compared together. Some are much more certain than others, and, indeed, 'self-evident' and 'intuitive.' Let us therefore take these to be 'truer.' If so, the thinker who feels most certain he is right is most ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... sold as antifermentive is simply the well-known antiseptic, salicylate of soda. It should be self-evident to one at all acquainted with the philosophy of animal existence, that an agent which will prevent fermentation and decay must be sufficiently powerful in its influence to ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... I think, that there is a very good reason for this popular extension of the term. The errors just alluded to have this in common with illusions of sense, that they simulate the form of immediate or self-evident cognition. An idea held respecting ourselves or respecting our past history does not depend on any other piece of knowledge; in other words, is not adopted as the result of a process of reasoning. What I believe with reference to my past history, so far as I can myself recall it, I believe instantaneously ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... being checked and verified by ethical principles of approved validity. Slavery is an interest which is sure to break over all restraints and correctives. It therefore becomes mistress of folkways and dictates the life policy. It is a kind of pitfall for civilization. It seems to be self-evident and successful, but it contains a number of forms of evil which are sure to unfold. The Moslems have suffered from the curse of it, although in entirely other ways than the Christians. It intertwines with any other great social evil which may be present. There it has combined with polygamy. It ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... which the Elegy was composed were well adapted to soothe and cherish that contemplative sadness which, when the wounds of grief are healing, it is a luxury to indulge, and that the poet did indulge them is self-evident in ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... draw this essay towards its conclusion better than with three memorable words of Milton; who has said, that poetry, in comparison with science, is 'simple, sensuous, and passionate'. By simple, he means unperplexed and self-evident; by sensuous, genial and full of imagery; by passionate, excited and enthusiastic. I am aware that different constructions have been put on some of these words; but the context seems to me to necessitate those before us. I quote, however, not from the original, ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... say to you on a more serious subject. Pardon me if I tell you that I think you are a happy man, and excuse me if I add, that if you do not keep yourself so I shall not think you a wise one. A good wife is better than a good-for-nothing mistress.—A self-evident proposition!—A stupid truism! Yes; but if every man who knows a self-evident proposition when he sees it on paper, always acted as if he knew it, this would be a very wise and a very happy world; and I should not have occasion to write ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... she had not the attitude of waiting for some one to talk to her, which people outside considered trying. Martha did not expect her cousin to talk to her. She seldom asked a question. She almost never volunteered a perfectly useless observation. She made no remarks upon self-evident topics. If the sun shone, she never mentioned it. If there was a heavy rain, she never mentioned that. Miss Martha suited her cousin exactly, and for that reason, aside from the fact that he had been devoted to little Lucy's mother, it never occurred to him ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... same root as the word "sew," and means, indeed, a thread, suggesting, therefore, a close knit, consecutive chain of argument. Not only has each Sutra a definite place in the system, but further, taken out of this place, it will be almost meaningless, and will by no means be self-evident. So I have thought best to adhere to the original word. The Sutras of Patanjali are as closely knit together, as dependent on each other, as the propositions of Euclid, and can no more be taken out of ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... the "level waters" of friendship. He states his position lucidly, and with a rational understanding of all that it involves. His vision is wide enough to embrace its everlasting truth. Plato says the same thing in simpler language. He offers his truth as self-evident, and in no need of demonstration. When Lysis and Menexenus greet Socrates at the gymnasia, the philosopher asks which of the two youths is ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... a sentence with "Clearly..." or "Obviously..." or "It is self-evident that...", it is a good bet he is about to handwave (alternatively, use of these constructions in a sarcastic tone before a paraphrase of someone else's argument suggests that it is a handwave). The theory behind this term is that if you wave your hands at the right ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... only a few minutes for Kennedy, in his most engaging and plausible manner, to state the hypothetical reason of our call. Though it was perfectly self-evident from the start that Mrs. Martin would throw cold water on anything requiring an outlay of money Craig accomplished his full purpose of securing an interview with Mr. Haswell. The invalid lay propped up in bed, and as we ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... sounding simultaneously, as in such well-known works as Cesar Franck's Symphony in D minor and Wagner's Prelude to the Mastersingers! As we face these questions squarely the need for the listener of special training in alertness and concentration is self-evident. A very small proportion of those who attend a symphony concert begin to get their money's worth—to put the matter on a perfectly practical plane—for at least 50% of the musical structure is presented to ears without capacity ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... all the other revisions, including Binet's own. Bobertag did not even regard the test as worthy of a trial. The universal criticism has been that it is a test of schooling rather than of intelligence. That the performance depends, in a certain sense, upon special instruction is self-evident. Without such instruction no child of 8 years, however intelligent, would be able to pass the test. Nature does not give us a conventionalized language, either written or spoken. It must be acquired. It is also true that a high-grade ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... think it's self-evident. She's exactly as much in love with Trent as she was a year ago, and she's fighting against it every hour of her life. And the strain's ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... our happiness, but that the enjoyment of pleasure, let us say, voluptuousness, to include everything in a word, is the veritable aim and end whither tend all human acts. This is very clear to me, in fact, self-evident, and I am fully persuaded of ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... published by the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic, Moscow, 1920. Translated by Malcolm W. Davis for the New York Evening Post, January 15, 1921.] is an historical judgment, the truth of which is by no means self-evident to ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... distinguished benefactors of the human race, who offer shade, shelter, fuel, fertility and sustenance, to a thousand future generations! They shall be thrice blessed! Having arisen to the demands of a higher life of unselfishness, where the solidarity of all life is recognized as a self-evident truth; they have gathered a sufficient store of love and wisdom to admit them to the domain of causation. Classed as worthy workers in that domain, they are entrusted by nature, with the magical key which unlocks the climatic gate, to her pent up ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... left the stage, but bang in front of the reader nothing happens. The suppression or maintenance of story in a novel is a matter of personal taste; some prefer character-drawing to adventures, some adventures to character-drawing; that you cannot have both at once I take to be a self-evident proposition; so when Mr. Lang says, "I like adventures," I say, "Oh, do you?" as I might to a man who says "I like sherry," and no doubt when I say I like character-drawing, Mr. Lang says, "Oh, do you?" as he might to a man who says, "I like port." But Mr. James and I are agreed on essentials, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... publish the old family notes on the matter, if, for reasons you state, you do not wish to publish Jefferson's letters to your father which concern the subject, it will be sufficient just to say he acted by and under his advice and aid, and people will accept it, as it is self-evident, because it is preposterous to hold that Mr. Lemen could have accomplished such results without some great power behind him. In conclusion, it is my judgment that your father's anti-slavery labors were the chief factor leading up to the free ...
— The Jefferson-Lemen Compact • Willard C. MacNaul
... distribution of his time and work, to be economical without parsimony and liberal without prodigality, and generally to follow such rules of wisdom as tend to render life prosperous, and human conduct acceptable to society. All such rules are self-evident, and grow necessarily out of the general principle which demands of the functions of the body to subserve the attainment of self-sanctification. But we must now speak precisely of this sanctification, to point out briefly in what it consists. From ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio
... a writer as Macchiavelli was so decidedly imbued with the earlier or mediaeval conception of the position of a prince that he treats it as a matter which is self-evident: he never discusses it, but tacitly takes it as the presupposition and basis of his advice. It may be said generally that his book is merely the theoretical statement and consistent and systematic exposition of the practice prevailing in his time. It ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... concerned changed completely. It hardly needed the Collector's order, given with the utmost promptitude, to cause the Temple woman to give the children up. To the Indian mind, quick to see the finger of God in such an event, the thing was self-evident. An unseen Power was at work here. Who were they that they should withstand it? A telegram told us the children were safe, and next day we ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... family, was a thoughtful, devout woman, who brought up her son in a way which suggests the mother of Ruskin. Of his early training, his reading of doctrinal and argumentative works, and of his isolation from material things in the thought that there were "two and only two absolute and luminously self-evident beings in the world," himself and his Creator, it is better to read his own record in the Apologia, which is a kind of ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... harmony is the truth of being, the Science of Mind-healing destroys the feasibility of disease; hence error of thought becomes fable instead of fact. Science demonstrates the reality of Truth and the unreality of the error. A self-evident proposition, in the Science of Mind-healing, is that disease is unreal; and the efficacy of my system, beyond other systems of medicine, vouches for the validity of that statement. Sin and disease are not scientific, because they embody not the idea of divine Principle, and are ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy
... too prolix in the most self-evident matters; for, as it has been concluded and established that there is no room anywhere for either virtues or friendships if everything is referred to pleasure, there is nothing more which it is of any great importance should be said. And yet, that I may not appear to have passed over any ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... their senses, and doubt of the existence of heaven and earth, of everything they see or feel, even of their own bodies. And, after all their labour and struggle of thought, they are forced to own we cannot attain to any self-evident or demonstrative knowledge of the existence of sensible things. But, all this doubtfulness, which so bewilders and confounds the mind and makes philosophy ridiculous in the eyes of the world, vanishes if we annex a meaning to our words, and not ...
— A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge • George Berkeley
... know the effects of certain invariable remedies prepared without fraud. Of course it is self-evident that when old Pare eulogized 'sack medicine' and ordered his patients to carry pulverized medicaments in a little sack whose form varied according to the organ to be healed, assuming the form of a cap for the head, of a bagpipe for the stomach, of an ox ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... me, O auspicious King, that Kamar al Zamar said to his sire, "I will give thee a self-evident proof that this happened to me when on wake. Now let me ask thee, did it ever befal any man to dream that he was battling a sore battle and after to awake from sleep and find in his hand a sword-blade besmeared with blood? Answered the King, "No, by ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... unloaded. But, my dear friend, what is the use of prudence? We can never be on our guard against all possible dangers. However,"—now, you must know I can tolerate all men till they come to "however;"—for it is self-evident that every universal rule must have its exceptions. But he is so exceedingly accurate, that, if he only fancies he has said a word too precipitate, or too general, or only half true, he never ceases to qualify, to modify, and extenuate, till at last he appears ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe
... an excellent turn to your letter. In refusing such an offer you could not have better reasons than those you give, and it would be absurd to try and persuade him that we are not lovers, as the thing is self-evident. Nevertheless, my ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... instructive manner in modern times. His view respecting the nature of scriptural doctrines,(352) that they can be reduced to the teaching of natural reason, is a corollary from his philosophy, which cannot admit that any religious truth is obligatory which is not self-evident, and is analogous to the doctrine which a short time previously had been stated ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... notes" was a debatable point, but that somebody was taking everything takable on the premises soon became a self-evident proposition; and this was uncomfortable for more reasons than one. Mr. Smith and I almost quarrelled about it. He would not believe it to be Chang-how, and I was determined it should not be Anarky. Said he, "Anarky is taking advantage of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... ill-will which would harm another man, or of selfishness that seeks my own private advantage. No, Gentlemen of the Jury, I am on trial for my love of Justice; for my respect to the natural Rights of Man; for speaking a word in behalf of what the Declaration of Independence calls the "self-evident" Truth,—that all men have a natural, equal, and unalienable Right to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. I am charged with words against what John Wesley named, the "Sum of all Villanies," against a national crime so great, that ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... popular expression esteemed figurative, but they affirm to be the simplest statement of fact. Then is their whole theory of social relations—both in and out of the body—most philosophical, and, though at variance with the popular theology, self-evident. It is only when they come to their descriptive theism, if I may say so, and then to their drollest heaven, and to some autocratic not moral decrees of God, that the mythus loses me. In general, too, they receive the fable instead ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... from our enemies, and, abstraction made from the monstrosities which are indelibly associated with the German name, there is much which the Teutons can still teach us. That the secret of success lies in a comprehensive system of organization is self-evident. But that organization must utilize all the resources of the Allies and include permanent arrangements, economic and other, for a future which shall not be a continuation of the past. Many of the advantages which the old ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... first greater importance was attached to Bulgarian co-operation than to Greek. Even the grant of {28} a loan to Sofia by the Central Powers appears to have produced little or no impression upon those concerned. Long afterwards it was admitted as a self-evident proposition that belligerents do not lend to neutrals without being satisfied that their money will not be used against themselves. But at the time, after a momentary shock, the Entente Governments were deluded, either by Bulgarian diplomacy or by their own wishes, ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... effecting the impression. The fact is, that perseverance is one thing and genius quite another—nor can all the Quarterlies in Christendom confound them. By and by, this proposition, with many which I have been just urging, will be received as self-evident. In the meantime, by being generally condemned as falsities, they will not be essentially ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... all beings great and small came by the law of cause and effect, are we not bound to work by the laws of cause, if we wish an effect? If the heavens do move by cause when was its beings divorced from that great common law? Are we not bound to trust and work by the old and reliable self-evident laws, until something later has proven its superior ability to ward off ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... States." This suppressed the fact that by the "Memorandum" the arms were "to be reported to the chief of ordnance at Washington City subject to the future action of the Congress of the United States." The allowance of arms to local authorities to preserve order was a necessity so self-evident that, in the face of this objection by Mr. Stanton, General Schofield, in supplementary terms of the final surrender, allowed Johnston's troops to retain part of the arms in this way, and no whisper of further objection was ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... "It is so self-evident that it is the way all governments are carried on. Wherefore, my good Paul, we only do what all other legislators do. We are never rogues so long as we call ourselves honest fellows, and we never commit a crime ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... mind in writing a collection letter is that it is a collection letter—that it is an effort to get money which is owed. It would not seem necessary to emphasize so entirely self-evident a point were it not unfortunately sometimes overlooked and the collection letter made an academic exercise. There is no excuse for a long series of collection letters—say eight or ten of them. After a man has received three or four letters you can take it for granted that he ...
— How to Write Letters (Formerly The Book of Letters) - A Complete Guide to Correct Business and Personal Correspondence • Mary Owens Crowther
... only couple their nonsense with a few self-evident generalities which no one would really oppose. No, first of all they must be educated and that you women alone ...
— Moral • Ludwig Thoma
... obvious relation between Hahnemann's three cardinal doctrines appears to be self-evident upon inspection. But if, as is often true with his disciples, they prefer the authority of one of their own number, I will refer them to Dr. Trinks's paper on the present state of Homoeopathy in Europe, with which, of course, they are familiar, as his name ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... design everywhere; and that the vast majority of the human race in every age and clime has seen it. Analogy from experience, sound induction—as we hold—from the works not only of men but of animals, has made it an all but self-evident truth to us, that wherever there is arrangement, there must be an arranger; wherever there is adaptation of means to an end, there must be an adapter; wherever an organization, there must be an organizer. The existence of a designing God is no more ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... far this necessity constitutes a sufficient reason for accepting this hypothesis.... Those who hold that the edifice of physical science is really constructed of conclusions logically inferred from self-evident premises, may reasonably demand that any practical judgments claiming philosophic certainty should be based on an equally firm foundation. If, on the other hand, we find that in our supposed knowledge of the world of nature propositions are commonly taken ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... was—concerning the persons and influences that had worked upon Jacob Delafield since his college days, was felt in good earnest by not a few of Delafield's friends. For he was a person rich in friends, reserved as he generally was, and crotchety as most of them thought him. The mixture of self-evident strength and manliness in his physiognomy with something delicate and evasive, some hindering element of reflection or doubt, was repeated in his character. On the one side he was a robust, healthy Etonian, who could ride, shoot, and golf like the rest of his kind, who used the terse, ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... manifest that there can be nothing like a wide comprehension of sociology, unless through a competent acquaintance with man in all his faculties, bodily, and mental. Consider the matter in the abstract, and this conclusion is self-evident. Thus:—Society is made up of individuals; all that is done in society is done by the combined actions of individuals; and therefore, in individual actions only can be found the solutions of social phenomena. But the actions of individuals depend on the ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... my lords, that your regard to justice, to truth, and to your own safety, will influence you to confirm this great and self-evident principle by a standing resolution, that may not only restrain oppression in the present age, but direct the judiciary ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... prove the contrary, the frequently heard myth that the interests of Capital and Labor are identical, and the existence of pacificatory associations based upon that myth, there is no fact in the whole range of social phenomena more self-evident than the existence of an inherent, fundamental antagonism in the relationship of employer and employee. As individuals, in all other relations, they may have a commonality of interests, but as employer and employee they are fundamentally and necessarily opposed. They ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... which can be briefly resumed in scientific formulae."[14] And Henry Adams, in a letter to the American Historical Association already referred to, confesses that history has thus far been a fruitless quest for "the secret which would transform these odds and ends of philosophy into one self-evident, harmonious, and complete system." ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... "Female Suffrage" demonstrates that no social argument—however popular or politically correct today—can be considered as self-evident. Those who favor full legal and social equality of the sexes at the ballot box and elsewhere (as I believe I do), should be prepared to examine and answer Susan Fenimore Cooper's arguments to the contrary. Many of those arguments are still heard daily in the press and on TV talk shows—not ...
— Female Suffrage • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... they ceased to persecute, and would gladly tempt you under the semblance of friendship and esteem to supplicate for some office, that they might indicate to the world your unworthiness by refusing you: a proof, as you know, quite sufficient and self-evident. ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... a thing with which you were not thoroughly familiar. I will therefore explain some things in language, since you are not familiar with the mechanism of thought transference. The Five, a self-perpetuating body, do what governing is necessary for the entire planet. Their decrees are founded upon self-evident truth, and are therefore the law. Population is regulated according to the needs of the planet, and since much work is now in progress, an increase in population was recommended by the Five. My companion and I therefore ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... It is a self-evident fact that, according to the state of mind in which we are, things assume different proportions in the ...
— Common Sense - - Subtitle: How To Exercise It • Yoritomo-Tashi
... even hazard a guess that the Andromeda's warm reception was arranged long before her masts and funnel rose over the horizon. That the islanders intended nothing less than her complete destruction was self-evident. Without the slightest warning they had tried to sink her; and now that she was escaping the further attentions of the field pieces, a number of troops stationed on South Point and the Isle des Fregates began to pelt ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... adequately rendered; that the measures, the dance of the revellers in their half-brutish disguises, the antimasque of country folk, and the final or main dance of the wanderers, were effective; that the whole was graceful, complete and polished, is either self-evident to-day, or may with reason be inferred. The scenery, too, must have been striking; the dreary forest, its darkness just relieved by the half-seen 'glistering' forms; the heavy drug-like splendour of the enchanted palace and the cold moonlight outside; the bright, ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... feel so much—coming in. But there seems to be no limit to the joy we feel when Power goes out through us. It seems so self-evident, so needless, to say "It is more blessed to give than to receive." Why of course it is: any child ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... and had the hut cleared of an excited audience, and shut myself in with Hatton and Cookson's agent, and asked him seriously and anxiously if there was not a big factory of the firm's on the river, because it was self-evident he had not got anything like enough stuff to pay off my men with, and my agreement was to pay off on the Rembwe, hence my horror at the smallness of the firm's N'dorko store. "Besides," I said, "Mr. Glass ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... a truth in the physical, and therefore in the spiritual, world of so great importance that we shall not mis-spend time if we follow it, for further confirmation, into another department of nature. Its significance in Biology is self-evident; let us ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... railroad iron after our magnificent system of railroads, extending its benefits to every portion of the Union, had been brought to a dead pause. The same consequences have resulted from similar causes to many other branches of useful manufactures. It is self-evident that where there is no ability to purchase manufactured articles these can not be sold, and consequently ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson
... continued the Captain, with the air of a man who propounds a self-evident proposition; "is it not clear that if the warm waters of the south flow into the Polar basin as an under current, they must come up somewhere, to take the place of the cold waters that are for ever flowing away from ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... I rose and walked a few paces to knock out my post-breakfast pipe against an apple-tree. I was not so sure that he was right, self-evident as his statement appeared. Ideas moved confusedly in my mind, convictions somehow impressed when that golden-bronze spot of light so gently came to rest above my heart when I last stood at the Barrier; the light so like the bright imagined head of Desire. To fly from ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... and accurate a version as the materials would yield, the following text has been founded upon a careful collation of both MSS. A few alterations have been adopted, but only when the necessity for them appeared to be self-evident; and the orthography has been rendered tolerably uniform, for there is no good reason why we should have 'sewe,' 'scho,' and 'sike,' in some places, and the more modern forms of 'sow,' 'she,' and 'such,' in others. If the MSS. were correctly transcribed, ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... the general wrapper, formed of thick, compact white satin, difficult to break and impervious to moisture. Brown and even black silk, laid out in abroad ribbons, in spindle-shaped patterns, in fanciful meridian waves, adorns the upper portion of the exterior. The part played by this fabric is self-evident: it is a waterproof cover which neither ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... not a mere surface. A door so thin as to have only one side would be repudiated by every man of sense as a monstrosity. When the geometrician defines for us the point, the line, the surface, and the solid, and when he sets before us an array of axioms, or self-evident truths, we follow him with confidence because he seems to be telling us things that we can directly see to be reasonable; indeed, to be telling us things that ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... "Isn't it self-evident?" he demanded. "I've been giving astrogation lessons to these characters. I certainly didn't do it to help them dump germ-cultures on Weald! I brought them here! Don't you see the point? These are space ships. They're in orbit around Weald. They're not manned and they're ...
— This World Is Taboo • Murray Leinster
... Cleo. It is self-evident, that they point at Self-liking and the Instinct of Sovereignty. But what is singular in these Laws is, that in their Operation they are the reverse ...
— An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War • Bernard Mandeville
... which can be raised. Any boy who has had experience in flying kites can testify to this, High winds, however, are almost invariably gusty and uncertain as to direction, and this makes them dangerous for aviators. It is also a self-evident fact that, beyond a certain stage, the harder the wind blows the more difficult it is to make ...
— Flying Machines - Construction and Operation • W.J. Jackman and Thos. H. Russell
... reading for an American, nor yet of interest to a military student; and its lessons have been taught so often by similar occurrences in other lands under like circumstances, and, moreover, teach such self-evident truths, that they scarcely need to be brought to the notice of an historian. But the crowning event of the war was the Battle of New Orleans; remarkable in its military aspect, and a source of pride to every American. It is well worth a more careful study, and to it I have devoted the last chapter ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... explain the causes of the "Origin of Species," with the statement that "no two individuals of the same species are exactly alike; each tends to vary." This is a self-evident fact, and is very properly used as a starting point for Variation. The next step is then stated as "variations are transmitted, and therefore tend to become permanent," which also is self-evident, and tends to prove the reasonableness ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... the outer world merely represents a detour which has been forced upon the wish-fulfillment by experience.[2] Thinking is indeed nothing but the equivalent of the hallucinatory wish; and if the dream be called a wish-fulfillment this becomes self-evident, as nothing but a wish can impel our psychic apparatus to activity. The dream, which in fulfilling its wishes follows the short regressive path, thereby preserves for us only an example of the primary form ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... digestion and fixed thought cannot go on together; it is even unadvisable to read while eating. Thus in all the old magical operations, which were, in fact, self-hypnotism, a perfect fast is insisted on with reason. This is all so self-evident that I need not dwell on it. It will be needless for anyone to take up this subject as a trifling pastime, or attempt self-suggestion and development of will with as little earnestness as one would give ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... explain each bend by the fact that the previous bend was in the opposite direction. But that does not explain why the river flows down-hill, nor show which direction tends downwards. We may account for trifling oscillations, not for the main current. Nor does it seem at first a self-evident proposition that vice, for example, necessarily generates over-strictness. A man is not always a Pharisee because his father has been a sinner. In fact, the people who talk so fluently about reaction fall back whenever it suits them upon the inverse theory. If a process happens to be continuous, ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... however, thousands, convinced of the value and benefit of the bathing, periodically attend these miserable substitutes for properly-planned, hygienically-heated, and effectively-ventilated Turkish baths. Viewing any self-evident shortcomings as irremediable evils, ignorant of the true principles of bath construction, and knowing little or nothing of the physiological action of the bath, they have neither the means of ascertaining, nor the power to detect, the genuine article ...
— The Turkish Bath - Its Design and Construction • Robert Owen Allsop
... an insult to common sense for us to set forth, in full, the injustice of their sentence. Both were guiltless towards the crown; while the hands of one, on the contrary, were deeply dyed in the blood of the people. This truth was so self-evident, that even a member of the Blood-Council, Pierre Arsens, president of Artois, addressed an elaborate memoir to the Duke of Alva, criticising the case according to the rules of law, and maintaining that Egmont, instead of deserving punishment, was ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... James Ritter," supplied the outlaw promptly. "I am not ashamed of my real name but my relatives had cause to be ashamed of its owner in his present condition. Their plans are almost self-evident, my lad. They will wait until dark and then slip over the wall, some will stop in that big building while the balance will make their way around to a building on the other side of you. They will then have you surrounded and have only to watch ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... superfluous to dwell at so much length on what is so nearly self-evident; but when a distinction, obvious as it may appear, has been confounded, and by powerful intellects, it is better to say too much than too little for the purpose of rendering such mistakes impossible in future. I will, therefore detain the reader while I point out one of the absurd ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... phenomenon of the saint, it is undoubtedly the appearance of the miraculous therein—namely, the immediate SUCCESSION OF OPPOSITES, of states of the soul regarded as morally antithetical: it was believed here to be self-evident that a "bad man" was all at once turned into a "saint," a good man. The hitherto existing psychology was wrecked at this point, is it not possible it may have happened principally because psychology had placed itself under the dominion of morals, because it BELIEVED ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... For self-evident reasons the title should be short. Aptness and specificness do not require an epitome of the story; and a title like "Why Tom Changed His Opinion of Me," or "What the Rabbit Drive Did for Me" is prosy as well as long. It used to be the custom to make the title of a writing a regular ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... into ordinary education do not discipline the mind in this way. Mathematical training is almost purely deductive. The mathematician starts with a few simple propositions, the proof of which is so obvious that they are called self-evident, and the rest of his work consists of subtle deductions from them. The teaching of languages, at any rate as ordinarily practised, is of the same general nature,—authority and tradition furnish the data, and the mental operations of the ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... and unreservedly the product of the geographical Hellas, acting upon the given factor of the undifferentiated Aryan brain,... To me it seems a self-evident proposition that nothing whatsoever can differentiate one body of men from another, except the physical conditions in which they are set,—including, of course, under the term physical conditions the relations of place and time in which they stand with regard to other bodies of men. To suppose ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... materials which the work requires, and to feed and otherwise maintain the labourers during the process. Whatever things are destined for this use are capital. That industry is limited by capital is self-evident. There can be no more industry than is supplied with materials to work up and food to eat. Nevertheless, it is often forgotten that the people of a country are maintained and have their wants supplied, not by the produce of present labour, but of past, and it long continued to be believed that ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... beyond all question, beyond all dispute; undoubted, uncontested, unquestioned, undisputed; questionless^, doubtless. authoritative, authentic, official. sure as fate, sure as death and taxes, sure as a gun. evident, self-evident, axiomatic; clear, clear as day, clear as the sun at noonday. Adv. certainly &c adj.; for certain, certes [Lat.], sure, no doubt, doubtless, and no mistake, flagrante delicto [Lat.], sure enough, to be sure, of course, as a matter of course, a coup sur, to a certainty; in truth &c (truly) 494; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Devices self-evident from the text. 1. Bombast and mock-heroics. 2. Horse-play and slap-sticks. 3. Burlesque, farce and extravagance of situation and dialogue. a. True burlesque. b. True farce. c. Extravagances obviously unnatural and merely for the ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... color as such, so self-evident to one who possesses it, seems to be wanting, except in rudimentary fashion, in a great many people. They are probably few, however, who do not feel some stirrings when they look through the stained glass of a cathedral window or upon ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... spiritual sense, to assail iniquity in high places and in low places, to apply our principles to all existing evil, political, legal, and ecclesiastical institutions, and to hasten the time when the kingdoms of this world will have become the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ. It appears to us a self-evident truth that whatever the Gospel is designed to destroy at any period of the world, being contrary to it, ought now to be abandoned. If, then, the time is predicted when swords shall be beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, and men shall not learn ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... to a very marked degree upon the success with which they can be carried out where they are counted toward a higher degree (M.A. or Ph.D.) the difficulty is not so great, since their introductory nature is self-evident; but where they conclude, so to speak, the student's formal training the difficulty of making them "fit in" is often sadly apparent. At any rate, in this borderland between cultural and professional studies, where the college is merging with the ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... drew to a halt without any command, and directly beside the young man, who was working diligently over the overturned motorcycle. His repair kit was spread out at the roadside, and the cause of the trouble was self-evident, it would seem. But Walky was a true Yankee and had ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long
... burner, is projected into the air. Now, considering the deleterious nature of all illuminating gases, the reasons for perfect ventilation of rooms in which natural gas is used for heating and culinary purposes are self-evident, not alone as a protection against explosions, but for the health of the occupants of the house, remembering that a larger supply of oxygen is said to be necessary for the perfect combustion of natural than ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... we proceed, that the function of an argument in philosophy, as in logic, is to prove that a certain relation exists between two concepts or objects of thought, when that relation is not self-evident. In the Darwinian chain we have, as the first link, organic life springing from inorganic matter, without the slightest relation existing between the two, except what may be universally predicated of matter itself, ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... inquiry of demonstrative science does not go on indefinitely, because one can come to principles that are self-evident, which are absolutely certain. But such like certainty is not to be had in contingent singulars, which are variable and uncertain. Therefore the inquiry of ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... displacement of a second portion of the liquid, and a consequent rise of level. Again, this second rise of level causes a yet further immersion, and by consequence another displacement of liquid and another rise. It is self-evident that this process must continue till the entire solid is immersed, and that the liquid will then begin to immerse whatever holds the solid, which, being connected with it, must for the time be considered a part of it. If you hold a stick, six feet long, with its end in a tumbler of water, and wait ...
— A Tangled Tale • Lewis Carroll
... one thing—a thing scarce distinguishable from any other old woman. But this transformation of a black wand into a wide-spreading tent was so obviously the result of magic, that it was self-evident they had to do with a witch in full defensive and ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... the symbols of number or of quantity, and, by proceeding step by step from more simple to more complex operations, we are enabled to express the same thing in many different forms. The equivalence of these different forms, though a necessary consequence of self-evident axioms, is not always, to our minds, self-evident; but the mathematician, who by long practice has acquired a familiarity with many of these forms, and has become expert in the processes which lead from one to ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... Newton, when, at quite a mature period of his career, Euclid was first brought to his attention, laid the book down after a cursory glance with the remark that it was only fit for children, its propositions being self-evident. Yet to those truisms Newton added very little. His work lay in their development and application. Laplace and Biot belong to our own day; but their task, too, consisted in the employment of old rules. The most effective tools of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... the first kind of truths, or those received by intuition, we have examples in what are called 'self-evident axioms,' and 'fundamental laws' or 'conditions of thought,' which no wise man has ever attempted to prove. Of the second, we have examples in the whole fabric of mathematical science, reared from its basis of axioms and definitions, as well as ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... international relationship, why then public opinion would go on being as ignorant and mistaken as it had been hitherto. But sound opinion and instincts in that field depend upon nothing of the sort, but upon the emergence of a few quite simple facts, which are indisputable and self-evident, which stare us in the face, and which absolutely disprove all the elaborate theories of ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... concerned Dan broke all records and narrowly escaped arrest in getting her to the Rodriguez home, but nothing further could be elicited from its dismayed chatelaine. Her sincerity, however, was self-evident; she could have had no hand in the ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... personal coming of Christ, and not any providential interposition, is here symbolized, is self-evident. For, while no created object can adequately symbolize Him, it would derogate from the dignity of his character and position to be a symbol of some inferior object. In all mere providential interpositions, foreshown by ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... of the departure of Don Luis de Bracamonte, asking you to be pleased to send a governor for those places, for Don Luis said that he would remain there only until the arrival of your Majesty's appointee—a thing that was self-evident, even had he not said it. Had it not been for placing a captain before one whom your Majesty had honored with the title of master-of-camp, I would have given those forts in charge to Captain Don Andres Perez Franco, to whom your Majesty, while ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 • Emma Helen Blair
... standard. Perfect culture should supply a complete theory of life, based upon a clear knowledge alike of its possibilities and its limitations." Against the second proposition he urged in the first place that it was self-evident that after having learned all that Greek, Roman, and Eastern antiquity have thought and said, and all that modern literature has to tell us, it was still necessary to have a deeper foundation for criticism of ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... silence for a brief space, after my somewhat elaborate exposition of these self-evident analogies. Presently a person turned towards me—I do not choose to designate the individual—and said that he rather expected my pieces had given pretty good "sahtisfahction."—I had, up to this moment, considered this complimentary ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... strikes the stranger at Nice is its Italian population. These black-eyed, dark-complexioned, raven-haired, easy-going folks form as distinct a type as the fresh-complexioned, blue-eyed Alsatian. That the Niois are French at heart is self-evident, and no wonder, when we compare their present condition with that of the past. We see no beggars or ragged, wretched-looking people. If the municipal authorities have set themselves the task of putting down ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... blacks were wont to make to whites, a form of salutation born of generations of slave-blood, meanly humble and cringingly self-effacing, rebuking such an exhibition of sheer and shameless servility and lack of proper self-respect, he would thereupon declare to them the self-evident truth that all men were born free and equal, that the master, with his white skin, was in the sight of God no whit better than his black slaves, and that for himself he would not cringe ...
— Right on the Scaffold, or The Martyrs of 1822 - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 7 • Archibald H. Grimke
... of knowledge asked the Querist Department to give a scripture to prove the last clause. He received this answer: "It seems to us that it is one of those self-evident views that needs no proof. If the Bible teaches otherwise let us have the chapter and verse. The Querist Department does not ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... at the speaker as if wroth with him for proposing so simple and self-evident a means of getting at the water at a time when they had only succeeded at the risk of losing ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... considers this to be so self-evident that he deems it unnecessary to advance any proof. He quotes the Chancellor's speech, and, moving for a quick verdict, declares his motion of guilty carried. The matter, however, is not quite so simple for the man who is seeking for the whole ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... of public indignation, which had for result that he was immediately set at liberty by the Chief of the State. The honourable character given the condemned man by all his fellow-citizens made the grossness of the blunder self-evident. The magistrates themselves admitted it, and yet out of caste considerations they did all they could to prevent the pardon being signed. In all similar affairs the jury, confronted with technical details ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... little tool (fig. 69), the invention of one of my youngest "hands" (and heads), and really a praiseworthy invention, though indeed a simple and self-evident matter enough. The usual tool for waxing-up is (1) a strip of glass, (2) a penknife, (3) a stick of wood. The thing most to be wished for in whatever is used being, of course, that it should retain the heat. This youth argued: "If they use copper for soldering-bits because ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... darken such a truth; no sophism can confute this clear principle. This is a certainty, if there be none other. This is the basis of all science. It is in vain to ask for a proof of that which is self-evident and irresistible. I exist. The consciousness of my existence is to me the assurance ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... has not been exempt from the destructive influence of causes whose operation has been steady and invariable in all ages and in all countries. The inference that this difficulty has been a preventive to marriage, and to the consequent progress of population is self-evident: to be understood it only requires to be stated. But the numerical increase of the colony has been checked in a still greater degree, perhaps by the constant returns from its shores which are daily occasioned by the same causes. What inducement, in fact, exists for any person ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... friend, you cannot limit the labour of adults unless you fix wages. This proposition he lays down repeatedly, assures us that it is incontrovertible, and indeed seems to think it self-evident; for he has not taken the trouble to prove it. Sir, my answer shall be very short. We have, during many centuries, limited the labour of adults to six days in seven; and yet we have not fixed ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to despair of Cooper's ever accomplishing again anything worthy of his early renown. They were pure works of art. No moral was everlastingly perking itself in the reader's face, no labored lecture to prove what was self-evident interrupted the progress of the story. There is scarcely an allusion to any of the events which had checkered the novelist's career. References to contemporary occurrences are so slight that they ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... the whole point. There are circumstances—perhaps, on the whole, the most numerous of all the various circumstances in war—in which close formation, if it can be used, is obviously an advantage; but it is equally self-evident that the losses of troops in close formation will be heavier than their losses in extended order. A group is a better target than a number of dispersed, ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc
... a man like him, who lives at court, does not like to have a mad niece in his house. The thing is self-evident; if I'd continued to play my part of the man of the robe, I should have done the same in a similar case. But here, as you perceive, we don't care much for appearances; and I've taken her for a servant. She has shown more good sense than I expected, although she has ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... principle of equality, as well as their practise of it was their legacy to our people, and it remains now all that differences us from other nations. It was not Thomas Jefferson who first imagined the first of the self-evident truths of the Declaration, but ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... the British fleet!" The great men took alarm, and that admiral was not sent. But they misconstrued the meaning of his answer. He meant not to imply any considerable danger to the British fleet. He meant to prove that one hypothesis was impossible by the suggestion of a counter-impossibility more self-evident. "It is impossible but what I shall take Cronstadt!" "But if you don't take it!" "It is impossible but what I shall take it; for if I don't take it, there's an end of the British fleet; and as it is impossible that there ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... my existence, and that He must be intimately acquainted with the operations and progress of the internal machinery, and consequent outward deportment of this creature which He has made; these are, I think, self-evident propositions. That there is a real and eternal distinction between virtue and vice, and consequently, that I am an accountable creature; that from the seeming nature of the human mind, as well as from the evident imperfection, nay, positive injustice, in the administration ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... simple newspaper advertisement to the means of propaganda in general, we at once stand before a question which is often wrongly answered. The practical handbooks of advertisements and means of display treat it as a self-evident fact that every presentation should be as beautiful as possible. In the first place, we cannot deny that the ugly and even the disgusting possess a strong power for attracting attention. Yet it is true ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... have only one side would be repudiated by every man of sense as a monstrosity. When the geometrician defines for us the point, the line, the surface, and the solid, and when he sets before us an array of axioms, or self-evident truths, we follow him with confidence because he seems to be telling us things that we can directly see to be reasonable; indeed, to be telling us things that we ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... effort" which had been found necessary in effecting the impression. The fact is, that perseverance is one thing and genius quite another—nor can all the Quarterlies in Christendom confound them. By and by, this proposition, with many which I have been just urging, will be received as self-evident. In the meantime, by being generally condemned as falsities, they will not be ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... asks for no peasant's toil. At the same time, the economic value of mushroom diet ranks second to meat alone. With bread, and mushrooms properly gathered and prepared, a person may neglect the butcher during the summer months. This is self-evident to the unscientific mind by the simple facts that mushrooms make the same use of the air we breathe as is made by animals, that cooked they resemble no form of vegetable food, and that in decay their ...
— Mushrooms of America, Edible and Poisonous • Anonymous
... account him the prince of philosophers, but I do not always share his opinion. Aristotle and the other philosophers have planted the tree of science, but the latter has not by any means put forth all its branches or matured all its fruit." This thought, though it seems to us self-evident, was of great moment in the age of scholasticism. Bacon spent ten years in prison; but in spite of everything, he was so much under the influence of scholasticism that he considered it the task of philosophy to adduce evidence for the truth of ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... we accept the Calvinistic doctrine, that God foreknows because He has foreordained. This, properly speaking, is not foreknowledge, but after knowledge, since it comes after the decree. It is, moreover, simply assertion. It is not a self-evident proposition, and is neither backed by reason nor Scripture. The great difficulty, however, with our Calvinistic friends is regarding certainty. If God is certain that an event will happen, then, so it is argued, it must happen. If we deny that there is an absolute ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... the existence of the Challon. The concept of telepathy is not a completely new or alien one to you, but the concept of a nontelepathic civilization was dismissed by the Challon ages ago as a simple contradiction of terms, a self-evident absurdity such as lifting ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... those of France and America. It compares advantageously with the second par. of the Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776) by the Representatives of the U.S., which declares, "these truths to be self-evident:—that all men are created equal," etc. It is regretable that so trenchant a state-paper should begin with so gross and palpable a fallacy. Men are not born equal, nor do they become equal before their death-days even ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... gave him daring: perhaps even poor George Dyer, like some unrecognized virtue, may have kept alive and nourished the pity and tenderness which were originally sown within him. We must leave the difficulty, as we must leave the great problems of Nature, unexplained, and be content with what is self-evident before us. We know, at all events, that he had an open heart, and that the heart is a fountain which ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... OF SURPLUS VALUE.—Marx claimed that practically all wealth has been created by the laborers alone, and that all persons other than laborers are parasites. To those who have carefully studied Chapter VIII the error of this claim must appear self-evident, nevertheless, this concept of value is the basis of all socialist attacks upon government and industry. Marx developed ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... included a State Church. This was not adopted. It distinguished the inequality of men from the equality of rights. This was deemed self-evident and superfluous. It derived the mutual rights of men from their mutual duties—and this terrestrial definition also disappeared, leaving the way open to a higher cause. The adopted code was meagre and ill-composed, and Bentham found a malignant ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... a struggle to toil upwards. The school tacked instead towards the sheltered bank of the stream, and with one accord broke into Scotch songs. Geraldine, in a full contralto, was singing "Green grow the rashes, O". Betty Blane's chirpy voice proclaimed "I'm ower young to marry yet",—a self-evident proposition, as she was only thirteen. Stuart and Loveday were crooning "Flowers of the Forest" as a kind of soprano dirge, which was drowned by a chorus of ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... can imagine as existing, we distinguish two parts, qualities variable and multiplied; and a being one and identical; and these two are so united in thought that we can not separate them in our intelligence, nor think of qualities without a substance." So it is a self-evident or first truth, that there is a subjective or inner man which thinks, reflects and reasons, for memory recalls to us the many modes of our mind; its many qualities and conditions. What variety of mental conditions have we not experienced? ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... Declaration we read, "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Glorious words! But they were not new; they were old and familiar when Jefferson wrote them. The American Revolution, which led ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... be We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with endowed by their creator with inherent and inalienable certain inalienable ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... question; past dispute; clear as day; beyond all question, beyond all dispute; undoubted, uncontested, unquestioned, undisputed; questionless[obs3], doubtless. authoritative, authentic, official. sure as fate, sure as death and taxes, sure as a gun. evident, self-evident, axiomatic; clear, clear as day, clear as the sun at noonday. Adv. certainly &c. adj.; for certain, certes[Lat], sure, no doubt, doubtless, and no mistake, flagrante delicto[Lat], sure enough, to be sure, of course, as a matter ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... one troop of workmen after another came over the bridge near the mouth of the river, several of them with the same sort of escort as her father, of wife or child. It was so usual and its meaning so self-evident, that no one ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie
... second axiom, which is to the effect that there is no city or country in the world in which it is possible to obey the law thoroughly, is also self-evident. A certain class of common crimes, such as robbery, cheating and swindling, murder and the like, are followed by a species of automatic punishment in all quarters of the civilized world, in spite of exceptions in specific cases, which result from the intervention of political bosses and similar influences; ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... disowning, and the forsaking, and the renouncing of the goodness, and the virtue, and the benevolence and the meekness, of the divine nature: that divine nature which has made itself so experimental and so self-evident in us all. And as this experimental and self-evident knowledge is the only sure knowledge you can have of God; even so, it is such a knowledge that cannot be doubted or debated away. For it is as sure and ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... question," continued Mr. Shellabarger, "I debate axioms, my apology is that there are not other questions to debate in Reconstruction. If," said he with well-timed sarcasm, "in the discussion, I make self-evident things obscure or incomprehensible, my defense shall be that I am conforming to the usages of Congress. I will not inquire whether any subject of this Government, by reason of the revolt, passed from under its sovereignty ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... persons and influences that had worked upon Jacob Delafield since his college days, was felt in good earnest by not a few of Delafield's friends. For he was a person rich in friends, reserved as he generally was, and crotchety as most of them thought him. The mixture of self-evident strength and manliness in his physiognomy with something delicate and evasive, some hindering element of reflection or doubt, was repeated in his character. On the one side he was a robust, healthy Etonian, who could ride, ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... however, religions of later growth have made morality to depend on the sentiment of gratitude to that Ruler for benefits received. The worthlessness, not to speak of the mischievousness, of such systems of morality is almost self-evident. As a type of morality founded on hope and fear, we shall take an instance from the Christian Bible: "He that giveth to the poor lendeth to the Lord." The duty of supporting the poor is here made to depend upon prudential motives ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... through the gaps of the mountain in the direction of Chattanooga, leaving nothing in front of the left wing but the reserves of Granger and those of Crittenden. These held their ground gallantly around Snodgrass Hill, but it was a self-evident fact to all the officers, as well as the troops, that the battle was irretrievably lost, and they were only fighting for time, the time that retreat could be safely made under cover of darkness. But before the sun was ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... as such, so self-evident to one who possesses it, seems to be wanting, except in rudimentary fashion, in a great many people. They are probably few, however, who do not feel some stirrings when they look through the stained glass of a cathedral window or ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... and foremost—life as we win it from the depths of despair, in the victory of the light, in the grace of self-devotion, in our intercourse with living human kind. God's supreme word to us is life, our highest worship of Him is love for the living. This lesson, self-evident as it is, was needed by me more than by most others. This it is that in various ways and upon many grounds I have hitherto rejected,—and of late most of all. But never more shall words be the highest for me, nor symbols, but the ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne
... increasing in this way, has any tendency to better the condition of the labouring poor. It is a self-evident proposition that any general rise in the price of labour, the stock of provisions remaining the same, can only be a nominal rise, as it must very shortly be followed by a proportional rise in the price of provisions. ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... his maligners, and then only to expose their ignorance, at the same time pledging himself never again to refer to their attacks. A thinking man, he could not but be fully aware that their style, and self-evident malice, could only add ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... San Francisco or Dawson City, it must necessarily be vaporous, introspective and chiefly concerned with "literary" impressions. Mr. Norris is, indeed, a "Harvard man," but that he is a good many other kinds of a man is self-evident. His book is, in the language of Mr. Norman Hapgood, the work of "a large human being, with a firm stomach, who ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... of Venetian architecture, in a form clear and simple enough to be intelligible even to those who never thought of architecture before. To those who have, much of what is stated in them will be well known or self-evident; but they must not be indignant at a simplicity on which the whole argument depends for its usefulness. From that which appears a mere truism when first stated, they will find very singular consequences ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... the blessings they are so eminently calculated to impart. And no point stands more invitingly open at the present moment for an experiment so indispensable to the true prestige of her power and greatness, than Ireland. Self-evident as the fact is, that that country has for generations been kept in slavery at the point of the bayonet, and plundered and starved by an accursed despot and her own deadly enemy, too, she can with the greatest possible ease move in the direction of breaking those galling ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... his adversaries' shortcomings. He stood forth the incarnation of party and class hatred; and now the victors, half dazed by the very completeness of their triumph, paused in mid career to look for a soldier with whom the army might be entrusted. That he must be a noble, was self-evident. Even the rabble, now that its first outburst had passed, was not so mad as to attribute military skill to any of its wordy leaders. The butcher's colleague must be a patrician, but he must be such a patrician as would cast reproach upon his class, while he supplied ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... in visiting; for preaching is in reality but a small part of a minister's duty.' Nay, ministers, especially ministers of but a few twelvemonths' standing, have themselves in some cases caught up the remark, as if it embodied a self-evident truth; and while they dare tell, not without self-complacency, that their discourses—things written at a short sitting, if written at all—cost them but little trouble, they add further, as if by way of apology, ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... Teachers come into this world out of the Unknown, bringing the essence of their Truth with them. We know well what they will teach: in some form or another it will be Theosophy; it will be the old self-evident truths about Karma and the two natures of man. But how they will teach it: what kind of sugar-coating or bitter aloes they will prescribe along with it: —that, I think, depends on reactions from the age they come in and the people whom they are to teach. It is almost certain, as I said, that ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... you would they should do to you." This natural and highest command had been taught and followed thousands of years before Christ said: "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." In the human family this maxim has always been accepted as self-evident; as ethical instinct it was an inheritance derived from our animal ancestors. It had already found a place among the herds of Apes and other social Mammals; in a similar manner, but with a wider scope, it was already ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... system of thought that poses as being concerned with man's welfare on earth can ever make headway unless it recognises this. Physical well-being is a moral consideration that should and must have our attention before aught else, and that this is so needs no demonstrating; it is self-evident. ...
— No Animal Food - and Nutrition and Diet with Vegetable Recipes • Rupert H. Wheldon
... miraculously, they know the effects of certain invariable remedies prepared without fraud. Of course it is self-evident that when old Pare eulogized 'sack medicine' and ordered his patients to carry pulverized medicaments in a little sack whose form varied according to the organ to be healed, assuming the form of a cap for the head, of a bagpipe for ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... principle of causality is the most ultimate principle which our minds can reach. Most of us accept this persuasion as almost of the nature of an axiom, and hence the mere suggestion that our own volitions are really uncaused appears to us of the nature of a self-evident absurdity. A little thought, however, is enough to show that the only ground of reason which this strong prepossession can rest upon, is the assumption that the principle of causality is logically prior to that of mind. Therefore ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... Nothing is more self-evident than that one should choose a region, especially as regards soil and climate, which is adapted to the crop or crops to be raised, yet there are probably more failures due to a lack of crop adaptation than to any other cause ...
— The Young Farmer: Some Things He Should Know • Thomas Forsyth Hunt
... were the genuine issues at stake, were subordinated to the claim of the inherent and inalienable rights of man. Hence the culminating formulation in the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." The cause of the community was to be won under the guise of the cause ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... a mistake, therefore, to admit that opinions cannot be compared together. Some are much more certain than others, and, indeed, 'self-evident' and 'intuitive.' Let us therefore take these to be 'truer.' If so, the thinker who feels most certain he is right is most likely to ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... intuitively known to men, but to attempt to prove all others. Against this, the true order of knowledge, those alike err who attempt to define and to prove everything, and those who neglect definition and demonstration where things are not self-evident. This is what geometry teaches perfectly. It attempts no definition of such things as space, time, motion, number, equality, and the like, because these terms designate so naturally the things which they ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... are, Mr. Eden, Aunt Davies and I—Oh!" The table being between the sofa and the door the poor gentleman's actual condition was not self-evident from the latter, but Susan was now in the middle of the room and her gayety gave way in a moment ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... propositions are necessarily taken for granted. These are called axioms, and are commonly regarded as self-evident. Yet their vital principle is not so much that of being self-evident as being, from the nature of the case, incapable of demonstration. Our edifice must have some support to rest upon, and we take these axioms ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... conscious, and is able to see, taste, hear, feel, smell. Whatever matter thus affirms is mainly correct. If you, O good, deny this, then I deny your truthfulness. If you say that matter is unconscious, you stultify my intellect, insult my conscience, and dispute self-evident facts; for nothing can be clearer than the testimony of the ...
— Unity of Good • Mary Baker Eddy
... in the water, as though loaded to her full capacity, but she was much too small for a transport, and for the life of me I could not imagine what her character might be. But there could be no doubt whatever concerning the destroyers; they were self-evident Russians, for they were four-funnelled, the funnels arranged in pairs, which was distinctly characteristic of a certain ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... Branik on the outskirts of Prague the idea called America is alive. A worker, dressed in grimy overalls, rises to speak at the factory gates. And he begins his speech to his fellow citizens with these words, words of a distant revolution: "We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." It's no secret here at home freedom's door opened ...
— State of the Union Addresses of George H.W. Bush • George H.W. Bush
... display that they heard. Canning and Wilberforce went together, and got into a pew near the door. The elder in attendance stood alone by the pew. Chalmers began in his usual unpromising way, by stating a few nearly self-evident propositions, neither in the choicest language, nor in the most impressive voice. "If this be all," said Canning to his companion, "it will never do." Chalmers went on—the shuffling of the conversation gradually subsided. He got into the mass of his subject; his weakness became strength, his hesitation ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... new train of thought. Certainly, infinity, omnipresence, could neither be limited nor outlined; those were self-evident facts. ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... the speaker as if wroth with him for proposing so simple and self-evident a means of getting at the water at a time when they had only succeeded at the risk of losing a ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... too self-evident for denial. The boys regretted the fact, since every hour of delay seemed to lessen the chances of saving Brick from the unknown fate ...
— The Camp in the Snow - Besiedged by Danger • William Murray Graydon
... to defectiveness of the burner, is projected into the air. Now, considering the deleterious nature of all illuminating gases, the reasons for perfect ventilation of rooms in which natural gas is used for heating and culinary purposes are self-evident, not alone as a protection against explosions, but for the health of the occupants of the house, remembering that a larger supply of oxygen is said to be necessary for the perfect combustion of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... caricature of your illustrious person in the guise of a soldier. Why, then, did he not bring it away from the place where it could only excite disaffection, and might even mislead those who should see it into the belief that your noble person was that of a dwarf? The answer is self-evident. He left it to betray others into further mockery, to bring them ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of their adversaries, however, did not remove the inherent weakness of the position of the Protestants. The dogma of the infallibility of the Bible is no more self-evident than is that of the infallibility of the Pope. If the former is held by "faith," then the latter may be. If the latter is to be accepted, or rejected, by private judgment, why not the former? Even if the ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... father was "a reasonable man," Irene had always held a self-evident proposition. She had never, until a few days ago, conceived the possibility of a conflict between his ideas of right and her own. Domestic discord was to her mind a vulgar, no less than an unhappy, state of things. Yet, in the step she was now about ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... folk the paradox is true that the best are the worst; those, that is, who do not expose themselves to ridicule or adverse criticism, whose good intentions are self-evident, who carry out to the letter the apostolic injunction of clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, and succouring the distressed. It is they who pander to all the worst qualities of the Arabs, improvident and incorrigible loafers, besides ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... undertake exposures do. You admit you never heard or thought of that before—the bladder, I mean. Yet it's as obvious as tintacks that a medium who's hampered at his hands will do all he can with his teeth, and what could be so self-evident as a bladder under one's lappel? What could be? Yet I know psychic literature pretty well, and it's never been suggested even! Never. It's a perpetual surprise to me how many things are not thought of by investigators. For one thing, they never ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... Rule of Right to be arrived at by combining partial rules: these are obtained from the nature of our faculties. The rule of Speech is Truth; Property supposes Justice; the Affections indicate Humanity. It is a self-evident maxim that the Lower parts of our nature are governed by the Higher. Classification of Springs of Action. Disinterestedness. Classification of Moral Rules. ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... brethren, the disenslaved Brazilians, frame their declaration of independence I hope they will insert this missing link: "We hold these truths to be self-evident—that all monarchs are usurpers and descendants of usurpers, for the reason that no throne was ever set up in this world by the will, freely exercised, of the only body possessing the legitimate right to set it up—the numerical mass ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... indeed, of course, hide His face for a time, but not definitively; in the end He ever arose at last against all opposing powers. "The day of the Lord" was an object of hope in all times of difficulty and oppression; it was understood as self-evident that the crisis would certainly end in favour of Israel. Amos took up the popular conception of that day; but how thoroughly did he change its meaning! "Woe to them who long for the day of the Lord!—What to you is the day of the Lord,? It is darkness, not light." ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... to be self-evident—that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... never lead him to over-estimate the evidence in its favour. We do not know the truth of these doctrines; we only know that they are probably true, and that probability is and must be enough for us; we must not torture our guesses into a sham appearance of infallible reasoning, nor call them self-evident because we cannot prove them, nor try to transfer the case from the court of reason to the court ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... to be cast in the same mould, and it is only the perversity of man himself that has brought the human race down to such a level. The stupidity of giving every scholar the same mental outfit is so self-evident as scarcely to need further comment. Even following the modern plan of stuffing minds instead of developing them, one would have thought that common sense would dictate the necessity of manufacturing as much variety ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... composed of three elements: the phenomenon perceived, the living subject with which this phenomenon is animated, and the vague yet real power involved in the life thus infused into it by the animal. Supposing any other animal to be the object perceived, these three elements are self-evident; since the phenomenon perceived in a given form causes the immediate assumption that it is a subject, actuated by a purpose of offence or defence, and hence follows the apprehension of a power capable of affecting him, which has in this case a real existence. Phenomenon, subject, ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... which people outside considered trying. Martha did not expect her cousin to talk to her. She seldom asked a question. She almost never volunteered a perfectly useless observation. She made no remarks upon self-evident topics. If the sun shone, she never mentioned it. If there was a heavy rain, she never mentioned that. Miss Martha suited her cousin exactly, and for that reason, aside from the fact that he had been devoted to little Lucy's mother, it never ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... This was so self-evident that the doctor checked Dan'l as he was about to make another skull-fracturing dash with the rake; and the next minute Dexter's hand clutched the grass on the bank, and he crawled out, with the water streaming down out ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... Malthus's opponents, as Mr. Bonar remarks,[217] attacked him alternately for propounding a truism and for maintaining a paradox. A 'truism' is not useless so long as its truth is not admitted. It would be the greatest of achievements to enunciate a law self-evident as soon as formulated, and yet previously ignored or denied. Was this the case of Malthus? Or did he really startle the world by clothing a commonplace in paradox, and then explain away the paradox till nothing but ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... us to the resolve of taking our honeymoon experimentally rather than chronologically. We started from the self-evident proposition that it ought to be the happiest ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... was established, the war was more open, and both parties more inveterate. Now the world seemed to think, so violent is the reaction of public opinion, that they could reason better without Aristotle than with him: that he had often taught them nothing more than self-evident propositions, or had promoted that dangerous idleness of maintaining paradoxes, by quibbles and other captious subtilties. The days had closed of the "illuminated," the "profound," and the "irrefragable," titles, which the scholastic heroes had obtained; and the Aristotelian ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... punishment it entails," and that is the whole point. There are circumstances—perhaps, on the whole, the most numerous of all the various circumstances in war—in which close formation, if it can be used, is obviously an advantage; but it is equally self-evident that the losses of troops in close formation will be heavier than their losses in extended order. A group is a better target than a ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc
... opportunity which presented itself in China for selfish ends; and by insisting that as she is on the spot she is the most competent to insure the effectiveness of Chinese co- operation, attempt to tighten her hold on the country. It is a fact which is self-evident to observers on the spot that ever since the coup of the Twenty-one Demands, many Japanese believe that their country has succeeded in almost completely infeodating China and has became the sovereign arbitrator of all quarrels, as well as the pacificator ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... breast—to say nothing of a thousand ingenious forms of torture inflicted just because "He sees that it is best for you," after having led you to see otherwise—that you cannot trust a God like that must be more or less self-evident. If you are part of His Self-Expression He cannot practise futilities through your experience and personality. He must be kind with a common-sense kindness, loving with a common-sense love. Whatever explanation of our sufferings and failures there may be we must not shuffle ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... This self-evident fact exercises a depressing influence on Dutch opinion, which has latterly shown a marked desire to ally the country with some other. An alliance with Belgium, that of the North and South Netherlanders, ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... as a fair means of self-defence. Thus, for example, when a muzhik is implicated in a criminal affair, and a preliminary investigation is being made, he probably begins by constructing an elaborate story to explain the facts and exculpate himself. The story may be a tissue of self-evident falsehoods from beginning to end, but he defends it valiantly as long as possible. When he perceives that the position which he has taken up is utterly untenable, he declares openly that all he has said is false, and that he wishes to make a new declaration. ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... of any obvious relation between Hahnemann's three cardinal doctrines appears to be self-evident upon inspection. But if, as is often true with his disciples, they prefer the authority of one of their own number, I will refer them to Dr. Trinks's paper on the present state of Homoeopathy in Europe, with which, of course, they are familiar, as his name is mentioned as one of the most ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... walked a few paces to knock out my post-breakfast pipe against an apple-tree. I was not so sure that he was right, self-evident as his statement appeared. Ideas moved confusedly in my mind, convictions somehow impressed when that golden-bronze spot of light so gently came to rest above my heart when I last stood at the Barrier; the light so like the bright imagined head of Desire. To fly from my ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... really pictorial treatment possible. No doubt Duerer has been misled by a too tyrannous notion as to what ought to be the physical build of so chaste a matron, and in his anxiety to make chastity self-evident, has forgotten to explain the need for it by such a degree of attractiveness as might tempt a tyrant to be dangerous. Just as Shakespeare, in attempting to exhaust every possible motive which the situation comports, has forgotten that ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... the Body Guard; then in the House of Lords, the Peers in their robes, the beautifully-dressed ladies with very many beautiful faces; lastly, the procession of the Queen's entry and herself, looking worthy and fit to be the converging-point of so many rays of grandeur. It is self-evident that she is not tall, but were she ever so tall, she could not have more grace and dignity, a head better set, a throat better arching; and one advantage there is in her looks when she casts a glance, being of necessity ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... at supper, the enemies of your party on the steps of St. Roch. This Capuchin Friar has been your helper 'mid the smoke of battles. But for him, be assured, you would not have been victorious, whether at Montenotte or Millesimo or Lodi. The marks of his patronage are too striking and self-evident to be ignored, and in your success I plainly discern a miracle of the good Fra Bonaventura. But what is most important you should know, is this; the holy man had a purpose of his own in view when, ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... to parade in his public harangues, as a triumphant general of yore his spolia opima. Of metaphysics he knew enough to confound all hearers and himself into the bargain. In logic he knew the whole family of syllogisms and dilemmas, and was so proud of his skill that he never suffered even a self-evident fact to pass unargued. It was observed, however, that he seldom got into an argument without getting into a perplexity, and then into a passion with his adversary for ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... Disraeli in Montague Place. Neither of these distinguished men can honestly be said ever to have acquired what is called the legal mind, a mental equipment which the younger of them had once the effrontery to define as a talent for explaining the self-evident, illustrating the obvious and expatiating on the commonplace. 'By adopting the law,' says Borrow, 'I had not ceased to be Lavengro.' He learnt Welsh when he should have been reading Blackstone. He studied German under the direction of the ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... long road that led him nowhere. That today still leads untold millions nowhere. For the penalty of a wrong answer is failure to solve the problem. That non-science had failed to provide any answer beyond the primitive one was self-evident. ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... and of the departure of Don Luis de Bracamonte, asking you to be pleased to send a governor for those places, for Don Luis said that he would remain there only until the arrival of your Majesty's appointee—a thing that was self-evident, even had he not said it. Had it not been for placing a captain before one whom your Majesty had honored with the title of master-of-camp, I would have given those forts in charge to Captain Don Andres Perez Franco, to whom your Majesty, while he was alferez, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 • Emma Helen Blair
... noodle of a Christophe, who showed us the address; there was a receipted bill inside it. It is clear that it was an urgent matter if the Countess also went herself to the old money lender. Father Goriot has financed her handsomely. There is no need to tack a tale together; the thing is self-evident. So that shows you, sir student, that all the time your Countess was smiling, dancing, flirting, swaying her peach-flower crowned head, with her gown gathered into her hand, her slippers were pinching her, as they say; she was thinking of her protested bills, ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... a natural course of reasoning, that there has never been an effected without a cause, and we infer from this, that there can be no action, either in animate or inanimate matter, without there first being some cause to produce it. And from this self-evident fact we know that there is some cause for every impulse or movement of either mind or matter, and that this law governs every action or movement of the animal kingdom. Then, according to this theory, ...
— The Arabian Art of Taming and Training Wild and Vicious Horses • P. R. Kincaid
... their gloss. In general, his genius does not appear to advantage in dialogue. His characters have not always a due regard to the brevity of human life. They make long speeches, preach dull sermons, and ventilate very self-evident propositions with great solemnity of utterance. Their discourse wants not only compression, but seasoning. They are sometimes made to talk in such a way that the force of caricature can hardly go farther. For instance, in "The Pioneers," Judge Temple, coming into a room ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... he shrinks back whenever it inspires him with a feeling of repulsion. He shrinks from it particularly when it inspires him with fright. This is a matter of course and self-evident. ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... of this method would raise the position of the novel to the level of a science, and that it would become a medium for the expression of established truths. The fallacy of the argument has been exposed by more than one critic. It is self-evident that the "experiments" by the novelist cannot be made on subjects apart from himself, but are made by him and in him; so that they prove more regarding his own temperament than about what he professes ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... letter to the American Historical Association already referred to, confesses that history has thus far been a fruitless quest for "the secret which would transform these odds and ends of philosophy into one self-evident, harmonious, and complete system." ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... truth in the physical, and therefore in the spiritual, world of so great importance that we shall not mis-spend time if we follow it, for further confirmation, into another department of nature. Its significance in Biology is self-evident; let ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... pregnant lady cannot sleep at night. The two most frequent causes of flatulence are, first, the want of walking exercise during the day, and second, the eating of a hearty meal just before going to bed at night. The remedies are, of course, in each instance, self-evident. ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... not so easily disposed of. In fact, the separating of the literature from the language, you will say, is a self-evident absurdity. That, however, only shows that you have not looked carefully into examination papers. I am not concerned with what the a priori imagination may suppose to be Literature, but with the actual questions put by examiners under ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... either self-evident or demonstrable to you, at this time and place, that there is any such city as Constantinople, or that there ever was such a ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... of its supreme importance, it is scarcely necessary to dwell upon the self-evident fact that this foundation—Emission, or Placing of the voice—should be well laid under the guidance of a skilled and experienced singing-teacher. Nothing but disappointment can ensue if a task of such consequence be ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... be thought by some to be exceedingly commonplace and self-evident.—It may be so. If they be admitted, we ask no more.—Our purpose at present is answered, if we have detected a principle in education, by the operation of which the powers of the mind are invariably expanded and strengthened;—an effect which, so ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... thought, nor can excite thought or feeling in the Reader. This is the only sensible manner of dealing with such verses: Why trouble yourself about the species till you have previously decided upon the genus? Why take pains to prove that an Ape is not a Newton when it is self-evident that he is ...
— Lyrical Ballads, With Other Poems, 1800, Vol. I. • William Wordsworth
... of a few philanthropists, and more than a century had to elapse before the mass of the people grasped and applied them. That freedom was a right, that the very first of the natural rights of man was to be free and to belong only to himself, would seem to be self-evident, and yet thousands of years had to pass before the glorious thought was generally accepted, and the nations of the earth had the ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... instance, the polar current—that broad current which flows down from the unknown polar regions between Spitzbergen and Greenland—and consider what an enormous mass of water it carries along, it must seem self-evident that this cannot come from a circumscribed and small basin, but must needs be gathered from distant sources, the more so as the Polar Sea (so far as we know it) is remarkably shallow everywhere to the north of the European, ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... of the Lutherans towards their symbols, and such their evaluation of pure doctrine, it was self-evident that the public teachers of their churches should be pledged to the confessions. In December 1529, H. Winckel, of Goettingen, drew up a form in which the candidate for ordination declares: "I believe and hold also of the most sacred ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... mathematical or demonstrative method; by tracing from ideas clearly conceived the consequences which were formally involved in them. What, then, were these ideas—these verae ideae, as he calls them—and how were they to be obtained? If they were to serve as the axioms of his system, they must be self-evident truths, of which no proof was required; and the illustration which he gives of the character of such ideas ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... extraordinary bird; although he may not be aware that it is considered to have become extinct towards the end of the seventeenth or beginning of the eighteenth century. The conditions of this disappearance are self-evident.[15] Imagine a bird of the gallinaceous (gallus, cock, or pheasant) tribe, considerably larger than a turkey, and consequently adapted for food, totally incapable of flying, and so unwieldy as to be easily run down, and it must be quite obvious that such a bird ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 575 - 10 Nov 1832 • Various
... the Wonder's pronouncements very elusive. In one sense I see that what I have quoted here is a self-evident proposition, but I have the feeling that behind it there lies some gleam of wisdom which throws a faint light on the profound problem ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim. If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... between the old and the new which is in progress throughout that section is no longer a simple conflict between the two sets of industrial principles of the Union along sectional lines, as formerly, but along race lines now as well. The self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence invading the old slave States have divided that house against itself. Their powerful ally, popular education, is creating everywhere moral unrest and discontent ...
— Modern Industrialism and the Negroes of the United States - The American Negro Academy, Occasional Papers No. 12 • Archibald H. Grimke
... self-evident the enormous difficulty of self-caused, self-existent matter. And when we see that matter acting, not irregularly or by caprice, but by law (as every class of philosopher will admit), then it is still further difficult to realize ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... vessels operating under the "pretended authority" of the rebel States; but he was speedily instructed by his own law Courts—e.g. in the Savannah and in the Golden Rocket (insurance) cases—that even such vessels were not pirates iure gentium. It is also tolerably self-evident that we cannot absolutely "close" our ports to any class of vessels. There is no inconsistency here between my friend Sir Sherston Baker and myself. We can discourage access, and of course, by refusal of coal, render egress impossible for privateers. ...
— Letters To "The Times" Upon War And Neutrality (1881-1920) • Thomas Erskine Holland
... this dogma is, in the main, as I said, the simple outcome of Jewish theism, with its "creation out of nothing," and really foolish and paradoxical denial of the doctrine of metempsychosis which is involved in that idea, a doctrine which is natural, to a certain extent self-evident, and, with the exception of the Jews, accepted by nearly the whole human race at all times. To remove the enormous evil arising from Augustine's dogma, and to modify its revolting nature, Pope Gregory I., in ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... affirmed with respect to the winds. Wind is a substance, as well as water, capable of great expansion, but still a substance. A certain portion has been allotted to the world for its convenience, and there is a regularity in its apparent variability. It must be self-evident, when all the wind has been collected to the eastward, by the north-west gales which prevail in winter, that it must be crowded and penned up in that quarter, and, from its known expansive powers, must return and restore the equilibrium. That is the reason that we have such a ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... man to be six feet high, and of every woman to be five feet four, was regarded as self-evident until women asserted their undoubted right to be six feet high also, when some confusion was introduced into the interpretation of this rhetorical ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... of it therefore ought not to be belated. But it is much worse to be premature or garrulous. In my own experience, I have never been sorry for keeping silence, especially if I had already said something. The only rule in the matter is comparatively self-evident. Never move toward any incorrectness and never present the appearance of knowing more than you actually do. Setting aside the dishonesty of such a procedure, the danger of a painful exposure in such matters ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... States laid it down as law that a slave had no rights which his owner was bound to respect. Up to the time of which we are now writing, it was certainly assumed, in our West Indian colonies, as a self-evident doctrine, utterly beyond dispute or question, that a slave had no rights which his owner was bound to respect. The band of resolute philanthropists who had taken up the subject in England were able to show that frequent flogging of men and women was a regular part of the day's ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... truth admits not of being evidenced. It is, nevertheless, accepted. It is accepted by men of all religious opinions, equally with men of no religious opinions. If any truth be self-evident and eternal, here is that truth. To call it in question would be worse than idle. We may doubt the reality of an external world, we may be sceptical as to the reality of our own bodies, but we cannot doubt that there is something. The proposition falls not within the domain of scepticism. It ...
— Superstition Unveiled • Charles Southwell
... The thing now was to use all her cunning of mind, all her strength of body, to save him from imminent danger; and the satisfied glint of Hervey's eye convinced her that the danger was imminent indeed. Why he should hate Jim so bitterly was not clear; that he did so hate the stranger was self-evident. The more she studied her foreman the more her terror grew, the more her lonely sense ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... that the coronet bone forces the navicular hard against the flexor tendon, which, in turn, presses firmly against the navicular as the force of the contracting muscles lifts the tendon into place. It is self-evident, then, that the more rapid the pace and the greater the load, the greater must these contending forces be, and the greater the liability to injury. For the same reason horses with excessive knee action are more liable to suffer from this disease than others, concussion ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... "Of course—that is self-evident. But it shows how the righteous seed is being over-flooded with iniquity, even in its last chosen house; how our Canaan is being given up to the Philistines. And therefore it is, doubtless, that Satan, in the pride of his success, is introducing his ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... a trace of flattery, as if he were merely putting into words a self-evident truth. A compliment of such staggering dimensions, however, ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... might even hazard a guess that the Andromeda's warm reception was arranged long before her masts and funnel rose over the horizon. That the islanders intended nothing less than her complete destruction was self-evident. Without the slightest warning they had tried to sink her; and now that she was escaping the further attentions of the field pieces, a number of troops stationed on South Point and the Isle des Fregates began to ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... formed the peculiar custom of singing in German—even at the Danish service. It is self-evident, however, that such a custom could not be satisfactory to Brorson. He was a Pietist with the fervent longing of that movement for a real spiritual communion with his fellow Christians. But a custom that compelled ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... neighbours, if they can. Men are placed in very different situations. Some have all the bodily pleasures that they desire, and many other pleasures besides, without plundering anybody. Others can scarcely obtain their daily bread without plundering. It may be true, but surely it is not self-evident, that the former class is under as strong temptations to plunder as the latter. Mr Mill was therefore bound to prove it. That he has not proved it is one of thirty or forty fatal errors in his argument. It is not necessary that we should express an opinion ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... for their value and their possibility on the object that is supposed to cause them. And in the verses just quoted this object is indeed named several times; but it is named only incidentally and in vague terms, as if its nature and its value were self-evident, and could be left to take care of themselves; and the great thing to be dwelt upon were the means and not the end: whereas the former are really only the creatures of the latter, and can have no more honour than the latter is ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... is self-evident,' replied the story-teller. 'It is this: however bad the woman whom one happens to possess may be, be certain it is always ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... to the Force exactly as long as had the First Sergeant himself, which was from the dawn of the Force's existence. And John G. is a gentleman and a soldier, every inch of him. Horse-show judges have affixed their seal to the self-evident fact by the sign of the blue ribbon,[70-1] but the best proof lies in the personal knowledge of "A" Troop, soundly built on twelve years' brotherhood. John G., on that diluvian night, was twenty-two years old, and still every whit as clean-limbed, alert, ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... declared that they "recognized that the principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence are fundamental and everlastingly true in their application to government among men." The Anti-Imperialists declared that the truths of the Declaration, not less self-evident to-day than when first announced by the Fathers, are of universal application, and cannot be abandoned while government by the people endures." In 1904, the Democratic party, while professing adherence to fundamental principles declared in favor of casting into the outer darkness of the ...
— "Colony,"—or "Free State"? "Dependence,"—or "Just Connection"? • Alpheus H. Snow
... knows nothing of annoyance; she is the idol of all who surround her, and she had the sensibility and goodness of an angel: in one word, she unites qualities which moralists consider incompatible; it is, however, only a self-evident fact to all who know her. She is evidently well informed, without pedantry; she has a delightful naivete; and though long since married, she has still the gaiety of a child, loving laughter like a little girl, which does not prevent her from possessing ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... be asked, should a critic of contemporary socialism think it worth while to expose with so much minuteness a fallacy which intellectual socialists now all agree in repudiating, and to insist with such emphasis on facts which they profess to recognise as self-evident? To this question there ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... an allusion to an eclipse of the Sun which possesses a two-fold interest—intrinsic and extrinsic. The former feature will be self-evident when the passage is read. The poet, in describing[166] the faded splendour of the fallen archangel, compares him to the Sun seen under circumstances which have temporarily deprived it of its ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... But this is just the point in dispute, and to set out with a bare affirmation of it is merely to beg the question and to abandon the discussion. Doubtless, by the mere act of consulting their own consciousness, the fact now in dispute appears to some persons self-evident. But in matters of such high abstraction as this, even the evidence of self-evidence must not be relied upon too implicitly. To the country boor it appears self-evident that wood is annihilated by combustion; and even to the mind of the greatest philosophers ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... crowded into it, it is necessary to study it in the religious edifices of the country. Plainness is the characteristic of the Shinto temple; built as a rule of pine, it has a thatched roof. The fact of its being an edifice of the Shinto religion is self-evident from the torii which stand before every Shinto temple. There are no idols or exterior ornamentation of any kind. The walls are left untouched by either the painter or the lacquerer. In the Buddhist temples, on the contrary, the Japanese artist has had afforded him full scope for the ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... that the defence of the cause of human freedom is falling into younger and more vigorous hands. That, in three-score years from the day of the Declaration of Independence, its self-evident truths should be yet struggling for existence against the degeneracy of an age pampered with prosperity, and languishing into servitude, is a melancholy truth, from which I should in vain attempt to shut my eyes. But the summons has gone forth. The youthful champions of the rights ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
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