"Credulity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... matter of fact. But this difficulty did not impede him from an attempted solution. He thought himself performing a great service when he addressed himself to the "destruction of that implicit faith and credulity which is the bane of all reasoning and free inquiry."[136] He refused to acknowledge a Supreme Being, in the following words: "While we argue from the course of nature, and infer a particular intelligent cause, which at first bestowed and still preserves order in the universe, we ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... employed. Whatever the educated might have believed, the lower classes were still forcibly impressed with the idea that the sentry-box and sentry had been carried across by witches; but on board ship the real state of the case was soon known, and the men, who kept the secret, chuckled over the credulity of ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... charmingly told—Challoner's growing delight in the initial mistake that confuses the pair as man and wife is so alluringly developed, and the whole little episode of twenty pages has such a way with it as to take your credulity a willing captive. This was my individual choice; but there are fifteen others of various styles; some mild detective studies, and a pathetic little ghost story that recalls to me one of KIPLING'S best. Altogether an attractive collection, very far above many ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 24, 1914 • Various
... for making magic out of what are but commodities to us, and that gift is not distributed by the generous gods from barrows which go the round of the neighbourhoods where many babies are born, as are faith, hope, and credulity, those virtues that cause the enormous circulations of the picture papers, and form the ready material for the careers of statesmen and the glory of famous soldiers. It is more unusual. We see it as often as we do comets and signs in the heavens, ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... daily examined the tablets which the Vizier Horam had given him; but was very uneasy at finding the leaves always fair. "Alas!" said he to himself, "I have trusted to a base man, who perhaps has taken this advantage of my credulity, and intends to set the crown of India on my brother's head! There needed not the powers of enchantment to overthrow me, since I have betrayed at once my ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... voice—in simple innocence of the world's ways and the world's perplexities and dangers, they were nearly on a level. No child could have surpassed Captain Cuttle in inexperience of everything but wind and weather; in simplicity, credulity, and generous trustfulness. Faith, hope, and charity, shared his whole nature among them. An odd sort of romance, perfectly unimaginative, yet perfectly unreal, and subject to no considerations of worldly prudence or practicability, was the only partner they had in his character. As ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... snow who carries a huge basket containing toys for children, and who really enters their houses by night. But how can the imagination of children be developed by what is, on the contrary, the fruit of our imagination? It is we who imagine, not they; they believe, they do not imagine. Credulity is, indeed, a characteristic of immature minds which lack experience and knowledge of realities, and are as yet devoid of that intelligence which distinguishes the true from the false, the beautiful from the ugly, the ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... sceptical and the non-sceptical: it is touched superficially with the coloring of superstition, with its tenderness, its humility, its thankfulness, its awe; but, on the other hand, it is not therefore tainted with the coarseness, with the silliness, with the credulity of superstition. Such a faith reposes upon the universal signs diffused through nature, and blends with the mysterious of natural grandeurs wherever found—with the mysterious of the starry heavens, with the mysterious of music, and with that infinite ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... know—all I felt. Deep down, as Miss Erme would have said, I was uneasy, I was expectant. At the core of my personal confusion—for my curiosity lived in its ashes—was the sharpness of a sense that Corvick would at last probably come out somewhere. He made, in defence of his credulity, a great point of the fact that from of old, in his study of this genius, he had caught whiffs and hints of he didn't know what, faint wandering notes of a hidden music. That was just the rarity, that was the charm: it fitted so perfectly ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... through this kind of explanation is simply a matter of learning the truth and acting upon it. It is a process of real enlightenment, and is very different from suggestion which trades upon the patient's credulity, increasing his already ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... impressed him. He had been to three or four of these in a certain road off Baker Street, and had been astonished and disappointed. The kind of people that he had met there—sentimental bourgeois with less power of sifting evidence than the average child, with a credulity that was almost supernatural—the medium, a stout woman who rolled her eyes and had damp fat fingers; the hymn-singing, the wheezy harmonium, the amazing pseudo-mystical oracular messages that revealed nothing which a religiose fool could not invent—in fact the whole affair, from the sham ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... old women of Greece, like the lawyers of modern times, were employed to defeat the schemes and operations of each other, and like them too, it is presumable, laughed in their sleeves, while they hugged the gains that arose from vulgar credulity. ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... and the three reconnoitred exhaustively the quarters of the deck in which the apparition had manifested itself to the woman. By no strain of credulity could the imagination be made to accept the effect of shadows at the designated spot as the shape of somebody standing there. On the other hand, when Phinuit obligingly posed himself between the mouth of the companionway and ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... sarcastic expose of the whole matter as a baseless fabrication, piling facts on facts to show that the first story was an ingenious piece of deception got up by the subject with the purpose of making capital out of the credulity of the public. There are no better detectives in the world than newspaper men. They work for the love of it. An expose is dearer to the detective-instinct in them than a laudatory article, and they leave ...
— The Goat-gland Transplantation • Sydney B. Flower
... duped by a very clumsy imitation of her garb, and the depravity of the fly, concealing her identity under a counterfeit presentment, exceed the limits of my credulity. The wasp is not so silly nor the Volucella so clever as we are assured. If the latter really meant to deceive the Wasp by her appearance, we must admit that her disguise is none too successful. Yellow sashes round the abdomen do not make a wasp. It would need more than that and, above all, ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... stages of repeated revolutions, we have said, 'Now we have seen the worst, the measure of iniquity is complete, we shall no longer bo shocked by added crimes and increasing enormities.' The next mail gave us reason to reproach ourselves with our credulity, and by presenting us with fresh crimes, and enormities still more dreadful, excited impressions of new astonishment and accumulated horror. All the crimes which disgrace history have occured in one country, in a space so short, and with circumstances ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... policy to keep in continual fermentation rivalships, jealousies, inquietudes, revenge and all other odious passions; establishing, by such means, his influence on the terror of some, the ambition of others, and the credulity of them all. Had I, when Merlin proposed his law concerning suspected persons, in the name of liberty and equality, been free and his equal, I should have said to him, "Monster, this, your atrocious law, is your sentence of death; it ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... himself into the best humour imaginable in order to divert the attention of his guests; he severely satirised those, whose rage for gaming induced them to sacrifice to it every other consideration; he loudly ridiculed the folly of the Chevalier upon this article, and secretly laughed at the credulity of the Piedmontese, whom he had ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... he asked. "The sun, it is true, has set; but the heat remaining on the ground hasn't yet gone, so you may, by coming over, get another sunstroke. Of course, I've had a thrashing but I don't feel any pains or aches. If I behave in this fashion, it's all put on to work upon their credulity, so that they may go and spread the reports outside in such a way as to reach my father's ear. Really it's all sham; so you mustn't treat it ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... came to the ship, and solemnly declared that Caraccioli had risen from the bottom of the sea, and was coming as fast as he could to Naples, swimming half out of the water. Such an account was listened to like a tale of idle credulity. The day being fair, Nelson, to please the king, stood out to sea; but the ship had not proceeded far before a body was distinctly seen, upright in the water, and approaching them. It was soon recognised to be indeed the corpse of Caraccioli, ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... people do not adequately realize what consummate address and fair seeming can be assumed by a deceiving stranger until experience enlightens them, and they suffer for their credulity. The danger, especially to young girls traveling alone, is understood by their parents; and no daughter is safe who disregards their injunction to permit no advances by a new and self-introduced acquaintance, ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... life; and those who don't. The second category is much the larger of the two. Very many people belong to it who think that they belong to the first. They may deceive themselves, but they cannot deceive a child. Although you may easily practise upon the credulity of a child in matters of fact, you cannot cheat his moral and social judgment. He will add you up, and he will add anybody up, and he will estimate conduct, upon principles of his own and in a manner terribly impartial. Parents have no sterner nor more ...
— The Feast of St. Friend • Arnold Bennett
... found?—that there should, in fact, be a sale for these printed mystifications, when officers of the government and officers of the armed force, attest on their honour the truth of these impudent impositions upon the credulity of mankind, affirm the accuracy and bona fide character of these winking, ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... naturally healthy mind is full of extravagant notions concerning angels and demons and what not; and your entire belief in, and enthusiasm for, your brother is a splendid advertisement for him. Let me tear the veil of credulity from your eyes. Let me teach you how good a thing it is to live and love and laugh like other people, and leave electricity to the ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... derive from fiction, lies in our overcoming to a certain extent the idea of its actual falsity, and in our erecting within ourselves a sort of secondary belief, to which, accordingly, our sympathies are submitted. Every thing, therefore, which interferes with this fair and legitimate credulity is directly noxious to the effect of the poem; it puts us back one stage further from the point of absolute faith, and materially diminishes the interest which we take in the progress of the piece. Spenser's ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... Faith and credulity are the same thing with different names. When a man has plenty of faith he is ready to believe anything. However fantastic it may be, however childish, however infantile, he accepts it with gaping wonder. His imagination is not necessarily strong, but it is easily excited. Macaulay ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... taken out of holes every bit as big as themselves. Considering all these things, it would be wonderful indeed if toads were not often found in places and conditions which would naturally give rise to the familiar myth. Throw in a little allowance for human credulity, human exaggeration, and human love of the marvellous, and you have all the elements of a very excellent toad-in-the-hole in the highest ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... that he must know everything. And finally, she wanted to know what it was like on shore among the great folk of Arendal, and particularly how the ladies behaved. It afforded him much amusement at the time to see with what simple credulity she took in everything he chose to invent on the subject; but after he had left he was not sure that he wasn't sorry for what he had done, and at the same time he made the discovery that the girl, in her way, was ...
— The Pilot and his Wife • Jonas Lie
... in silence to find the table laid, a plentiful supper spread, and the company seated. After supper came singing of songs, saying of ballads, and telling of tales. I know with what in- credulity many highlanders will read of a merry-making in their own country at which no horn went round, no punch-bowl was filled and emptied without stint! But the clearer the brain, the better justice is done to the more etherial wine of fthe soul. ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... a man to Credulity, so as to believe many times impossibilities: for such know nothing to the contrary, but that they may be true; being unable to detect the Impossibility. And Credulity, because men love to be hearkened unto in company, disposeth them to lying: so that ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... days of adding and tabulating machines, accounting in most stores is still done by cheap hand labor, is a statement which strains credulity. Merely from the standpoint of business economy it seems absurd. But it is a ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... the same satisfaction I found that the result of my inquiry concerning your clergy was not dissimilar. It is no soothing news to my ears, that great bodies of men are incurably corrupt. It is not with much credulity I listen to any, when they speak evil of those whom they are going to plunder. I rather suspect that vices are feigned or exaggerated, when profit is looked for in their punishment. An enemy is a bad witness; a robber is a worse. Vices and abuses ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... pretended repairers, who endeavour to persuade them into the belief that it is necessary to do this, that, and the other for their benefit. The quack doctors of the Violin are legion—they are found in every town and city, ready to prey upon the credulity of the lovers of Fiddles, and the injury they inflict on their helpless patients is frequently irreparable. Unfortunately, amateurs are often prone to be continually unsettling their instruments by trying different bars, sound-posts, &c., without considering the danger they run of damaging ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... inviolableness of God's righteousness, with the purity of his holiness, can hardly be persuaded, that any thing can compense that infinite wrong that is done to his Majesty, though ordinarily the small and superficial apprehension of sin makes a kind of facility in this, or an empty credulity of the gospel. The reason why most men do not question and doubt of the gospel, and of their acceptance before God, is not because they are established in the faith, but rather because they do not so seriously and ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... maxims of those about her; versed in a selfish philosophy in which she was all unpractised, she had all the vices of a courtier, all the nobleness of developing womanhood. She trusted nothing and no one, yet there were times when she quitted her sceptical attitude for a submissive credulity. ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... to accept Darwins or any other derivative theory as true. The time has not come for that, and perhaps never will. We also advise against a similar credulity on the other side, in a blind faith that species—that the manifold sorts and forms of existing animals and vegetables—"have no secondary cause." The contrary is already not unlikely, and we suppose will hereafter become ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... undermine the foundations of the house, he would have brought the whole of it down about his ears. The story spread all over the city; so that the little boys in the streets used to point their fingers at him, and shout in his ears the story of the gipsy's trick, and his own credulity. Such was the tale told by the old gitana, in explanation of her unwillingness to go ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... want you for?" He was making light of her now, his question accompanied by a hard, cynical look which told her that she could say as much or as little as she chose and he'd suit himself in the extent of his credulity. "Were you the lovely cashier in an ice cream store? And did you abscond with ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... with credulity to the whispers of fancy and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope, who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow, attend to the history of Rasselas, here in ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... them.' 'You acted wisely,' observed Antonio; 'by the saints! it was a good thought of mine to introduce you to my mother's lodger as a trustworthy messenger! If he only knew that we had shared his gold, and were laughing at him for his credulity, he would not be over well pleased. His purse appears to be pretty well lined, and when we have got all our present business off our hands we will devote our attention to the lodger. The Arno is deep and a foreigner the less in the ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... put it into a honey barrel. And he, as it were discontented, cried out, Shame take thee, yet I will pursue my purpose, and seek after the cause, as if this sweetness were a taste natural and proper to the fruit. Therefore neither will we admit Neanthes's credulity and inadvertency in some stories as an excuse and a good reason for avoiding this disquisition; for we shall exercise our thoughts by it, though no other advantage ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... its short triumphs and the persuasive critic or the creator of art values may effect real value but for a day. The limit of the credulity of the public, which Lincoln has immortalized, is the basis ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... great readiness to show every article which they had got from the ships, repeating the name of the donor with great warmth, as if offended at our suspicions, yet with a half-smile on their countenances at our supposed credulity in believing them. There was, indeed, at all times some degree of trick and cunning in this show of openness and candour; and they would at times bring back some very trifling article that had been given them, ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry
... easy to conceive the abuse that may be made by the clergy of the credulity of a nation in which such ridiculous and absurd practices prevail as those to which we have already alluded. The priest is considered, in Roman Catholic countries, as the representative of Jesus Christ, the only depositary ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... challenge the credulity of the uninitiated. The land on which these record yields were secured had been raising twenty, forty, and fifty bushels of corn to the acre. Over great sections, the per acre average was well under twenty. Into this ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... iron; the shrieking of bats and the screaming of owls and other creatures that resort to desolate or half-inhabited buildings; these and the like circumstances in the domestic life of the people I speak of, would multiply their superstitions and increase their credulity; and among warriors who set all danger at defiance, would encourage a passion for wild ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... of all fools is wisely put in April. The jest of the day resides in the success with which credulity is imposed upon, and April is the month of easiest credulity. Let bragging travellers come in April and hold us with tales of the Anthropopagi! If their heads are said to grow beneath their shoulders, still we will turn ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... women. He had to be consulted in illness, in peace, in war, at every moment of importance to individual or nation. Even in case of illness and disease he found more value in secret communications with the supernatural world, and in working on the credulity of his tribesmen, than in the use of medicines made from plants. The grossest superstition dominated every community. All sorts of mystic ceremonies, some most cruel and repugnant to every sense of decency, were usual on occasions when supernatural influences ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... with the result,—a principle that has acquired canonical authority in modern scientific research. "In what follows," writes he, introducing a long string of hypotheses, the fallacy of which he had already discovered, "let the reader pardon my credulity, whilst working out all these matters by my own ingenuity. For it is my opinion that the occasions by which men have acquired a knowledge of celestial phenomena are not less admirable than the discoveries themselves." His tentatives, failures, leadings, his glimpses ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... were hidden behind muffs when she spoke of those nocturnal sessions of the Chamber, which were only nights passed in Marianne's bed! How those Parisians must have laughed at her and ridiculed the credulity of the woman who believes herself loved, but who is deceived and mocked at! Madame Gerson, Sabine! How overjoyed they must have been when, in their salons, they referred to the little, stupid Provincial who ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... denouncing Iredale. For one instant she shook like an aspen. Then she recovered herself. What was to be done? She tried to think. This matter of Hervey was of her doing. She had driven him to it; urged him to it. Now she realized the full horror of what her foolish credulity had led her into. It had been in her power to stay his hand, at least to draw his fangs. Now it was too late. Suddenly she turned upon her lover in one final appeal. At that moment it seemed the only chance ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... the military authorities, he having confessed to the existence of a plot in the city. Pericles came fuming to Wilfrid's quarters. Wilfrid gathered from him that Sarpo's general confession had been retracted: it was too foolish to snare the credulity of Austrian officials. Sarpo stated that he had fabricated the story of a plot, in order to escape the persecutions of a terrible man, and find safety in prison lodgings vender Government. The short confinement for a civic offence was not his idea of safety; ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... said the king, "in what way can you possibly have offended me? I cannot perceive how. Surely not on account of a young girl's harmless and very innocent jest? You turned the credulity of a young man into ridicule—it was very natural to do so: any other woman in your place ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Korean annals, and it is further to be remembered that the Korean peninsula was divided during many centuries into three principalities whose records serve as mutual checks. Finally, Korean historians do not make any such demand upon our credulity as the Japanese do in the matter of length of sovereigns' reigns. For example, while the number of successions to the throne of Japan during the first four centuries of the Christian era is set down as ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... contrast upon the apparently excessive credulity of Othello has been already pointed out. What further conclusions can be drawn from it? Obviously, to begin with, the inference, which is accompanied by a thrill of admiration, that Iago's powers of dissimulation and of self-control must have been prodigious: for he was not a youth, like Edmund, ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... their eyes, and ought to be in ours, not merely falsehood, but impiety. Let the reader be sure of this—that these documents would not have exercised their enormous influence on the human mind, had there not been in them, under whatever accidents of credulity, and even absurdity, an element of sincerity, ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... breath. I know that I could never get him to see the real truth about me; I might tell him that I have let myself be tied up in a golden net—but he would only marvel at my spirituality. Oh, the women I have seen trading upon the credulity of men! And when I think how I did this myself! If men were wise, they would give us the vote, and a share in the world's work—anything that would bring us out into the light of day, and break the spell of mystery ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... wrong, it was wrong!' he muttered at length. 'Nothing can excuse it; nothing can atone for it,—for nothing can recall those years of cursed credulity; nothing obliterate them!—nothing, nothing!' he repeated in a whisper, whose despairing bitterness ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... reader get an exaggerated notion of Michael's credulity, it may be well to say that Nick had painted a few days before, in a fit of caprice, and that one-half of his face was black, and the other a deep red, while each of his eyes was surrounded with a circle of white, all of which had got to be a little confused in consequence ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... almost innate in them. In this State, a few persons were deluded by the X. Y. Z. duperies. You saw the effect of it in our last Congressional representatives, chosen under their influence. This experiment on their credulity is now seen into, and our next representation will be as republican as it has heretofore been. On the whole, we hope, that by a part of the Union having held on to the principles of the constitution, time has been given to the States to recover ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... the miracle resolved itself into a series of events which, though surprising enough, could not by any stretch of the credulity be called supernatural. ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... being strictly enforced. You, dear sir, are too little experienced in these circumstances, however obvious your other merits are to me, to act on your own judgment in the matter, as you have hitherto done. Credulity can in the present instance only lead to embarrassment, the result of which might prove injurious to you rather than beneficial, and this I wish to avoid for the ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826 Vol. 2 • Lady Wallace
... Tim behave?" asked Mrs. Crachit; when she had rallied Bob on his credulity, and Bob had hugged his ...
— Ten Boys from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... profession affecting directly the health and life of every human body, which needs to avail itself of the accumulated experience, knowledge, and science of all the ages, is open to every ignorant and stupid practitioner on the credulity of the public. Why cannot we get a law regulating the profession which is of most vital interest to all of us, excluding ignorance and quackery? Because the majority of our legislature, representing, I suppose, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... fear. True, his chagrin was very great. He saw only too plainly what want of discretion he had displayed in trusting to the Breed's story, but he felt that his previous association with the rascal warranted his credulity, and the outcome must be regarded as the fortune of war. He only wondered what strange experience this blindfold journey was to forerun. There was not the least doubt in his mind as to whose was the devising of this ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... sight of the railway line, that well agreed with our frame of mind. It was none of the newfangled, underdone affairs that ape hotels, with Greek managers and as many different prices for one service as there are grades of credulity, but a genuine two-hundred-year-old Turkish place, run by a Turk, and named Yeni Khan (which means the new rest house) in proof that once the world was younger. The man who directed us to the place called it a kahveh; but that means a place for donkeys and foot-passengers, and when ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... litigation and otherwise. He devoted himself to the collection of antiquarian and miscellaneous observations, and gave assistance to Dugdale and Anthony a-Wood in their researches. His own investigations were extensive and minute, but their value is much diminished by his credulity, and want of capacity to weigh evidence. His only publication is his Miscellanies, a collection of popular superstitions, etc., but he left various collections, which were edited and publ. in ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... and with the beautiful fore-finger of her right hand, always jewelled with great brilliancy, will she satisfactorily enlighten the stupid on the fame of the ancient Choicewest family, thereon inscribed. With no ordinary design on the credulity of her friends, Lady Choicewest has several times strongly intimated that she was not quite sure that one or two of her ancestors in the male line of the family were not reigning dukes as far down as the noble reign of the ignoble ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... curriculum of study which it required—became almost a distinct class in society. The occupation was a lucrative one, and its accomplished professors had numerous rivals whose educational antecedents were unknown, but who excited the envy of the experts in their trading upon the credulity of the people. These quacks went about the country drawing up horoscopes, and arranging schemes of birthday prognostications, of which the majority were without any authentic warranty. The law sometimes took note of the fact that they were competing with the official experts, and interfered ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... contemplation. This moment was pregnant with fate. I had no power to reason. In the career of my tempestuous thoughts, rent into pieces as my mind was by accumulating horrors, Carwin was unseen and unsuspected. I partook of Wieland's credulity, shook with his amazement, and panted ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... ignorant you say The thing that's not, elated still to sway The crass credulity of gaping fools And women ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called ...
— Maxims for Revolutionists • George Bernard Shaw
... retirement to which, of course, he would betake himself, when the melancholy proceedings consequent on the bankruptcy were brought to an end. It was shown that he had been egregiously duped in the transaction—that his credulity had cost him and his family a large fortune—that he had given up every penny which belonged to him—that there could not be any sort of stain upon his honest reputation. The judge before whom he appeared spoke with feeling and regard of the unhappy ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... whether I felt more of anger or of sorrow. The confidence with which I had abandoned myself to my love for Brigitte, had been so sweet and so natural that I could not bring myself to believe that so much happiness had been built upon an illusion. That sentiment of credulity, which had attracted me to her, seemed a proof that she was worthy. Was it possible that these four months of happiness were ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... sums up his view of the commissioners in the words of Edmund Burke: "It is not with much credulity that I listen to any when they speak ill of those whom they are going to plunder. I rather suspect that vices are feigned, or exaggerated, when profit is looked for in the punishment—an enemy is a bad witness; a ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... what I know of Bendigo Jones, I must admit that this reputed remark taxes even my credulity. Mad he undoubtedly was when viewed by the sordid standards of the vandals around him, but this inspiring ode to a sandbag grew somewhat, I cannot but help thinking, in the transmission. The regrettable thing was that it should ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... supernatural interference, and which Jewish and heathen quacks frequently performed. [279:1] No writer of this period asserts that he himself possessed the power either of speaking with tongues, [279:2] or of healing the sick, or of raising the dead. [279:3] Legend now began to supply food for popular credulity; and it is a suspicious circumstance that the greater number of the miracles which are said to have happened in the second and third centuries are recorded for the first time about a hundred years after the alleged date of their occurrence. [279:4] But Christianity derived no ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... problem; how was I to be serviceable to a being that was invisible, that was mortal no longer? "Maybe at the moment the Lord will put it into our heads." This is very old-fashioned phraseology, and a week before, most likely, I should have smiled (though always with kindness) at Dr. Moncrieff's credulity; but there was a great comfort, whether rational or otherwise I cannot say, in the mere ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... series of seventeen hundred years, you shall see as much added to her by America in the course of a single life!" If this state of his country had been foretold to him, would it not require all the sanguine credulity of youth, and all the fervid glow of enthusiasm, to make him believe it? Fortunate man, he has lived to see it! Fortunate indeed, if he lives to see nothing that shall vary the prospect, and cloud ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... rapidly. There is more danger that they should overrate, than that they should undervalue, the evidence of others; because, as we formerly stated, we take it for granted, that they have had little experience of falsehood. We should, to preserve them from credulity, excite them in all cases where it can be obtained, never to rest satisfied without the strongest species of evidence, that of their own senses. If a child says, "I am sure of such a thing," we should immediately examine into his ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... fashion of a pumpkin, and surmounted by a Don Quixote nose that rose out of it like a monolith above a plain. It was the kind of nose, as Cervantes must surely have explained somewhere, which denotes an inborn enthusiasm for all things great, a tendency which is apt to degenerate into credulity. ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... quietly and calmly, here a little, there a little, without chronological order, each one touched upon as it happened to suggest itself. From wondering I found myself every now and then believing: but whenever I realized the folly in which I was indulging myself, I shook off my credulity and endeavored to listen with interest, but without judgment, for in this way only could I most thoroughly enjoy the strange narrative; but my lapses into unconscious belief ...
— The Vizier of the Two-Horned Alexander • Frank R. Stockton
... uncle by his mother's side, having been my particular friend. His (that's Tom's uncle's) fate was a melancholy one. Gas was the death of him. When it was first talked of, he laughed. He wasn't angry; he laughed at the credulity of human nature. "They might as well talk," he says, "of laying on an everlasting succession of glow-worms;" and then he laughed again, partly at his joke, ...
— The Lamplighter • Charles Dickens
... for such proof is gratified. Knowledge puts faith out of the question, for faith to me means a trusting on spiritual grounds. And surely the acceptance of scriptural statements like that of the miraculous birth without investigation is not faith—it is mere credulity. If Jesus had been born in a miraculous way, the disciples must have known it. Joseph must have known it when he heard the answer 'I must be about my father's business,' and their ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... acquaintance of our new friends, the natives. Ever liberal of communication, no difficulty but of understanding each other subsisted between us. Inexplicable contradictions arose to bewilder our researches which no ingenuity could unravel and no credulity reconcile. ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... a red-blooded man, and a true Colonel at that, ever stopped with just a part of one of those refreshments which have made St. Louis hospitality proverbial and become one of our most distinctive genre institutions, is to strain credulity too far. Are the Colonel's powers of self restraint altogether transcendent? Have we found the ...
— The Ideal Bartender • Tom Bullock
... introduce supernatural agents as seldom as possible. We should not then have seen his gods coming on trivial errands, and often behaving themselves so as not only to forfeit all title to respect, but to become the objects of scorn and derision. A conduct which must have shocked the credulity of a pious and sagacious heathen; and which could never have been defended, unless by agreeing with a supposition to which I have been sometimes almost inclined, that this most glorious poet, as he certainly was, had an intent to burlesque the superstitious faith ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... shifted the unknown crime of the fanatic! The witching, enigmatic Debora haunted his memory; and with dismay he recalled the blistering vision evoked by the music, through which she had glided like some tremulous Lamia. Decidedly his imagination had carried him far. He cursed his easy credulity, he reviled his ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... "My credulity is not sufficient for me to commit myself to that belief. If investigation should show that Mr. ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... leaned across the table, lifted up the boy's chin, and looked into his eyes. "My dear young friend," he said, "I fear you have fallen into evil ways since you passed out of the range of my beneficent influence. But you should not try to impose so glittering a romance on the verdant credulity of an old acquaintance at the first ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene
... blackness and darkness of death." This is nearly the feeling that his disciples of forty years ago entertained towards himself; but their discipleship has rarely lasted through life. They came to his writings, inspired by the youthful enthusiasm that carries with it a vein of credulity, intoxicated by their fervour as by new wine or mountain air, and found in them the key of the perennial riddle and the solution of the insoluble mystery. But in later years the curtain to many ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... generation, fact has been added to fact and law to law, the true method and order of the Universe being thereby more and more revealed. In doing this, Science has encountered and overthrown various forms of superstition and deceit, of credulity and imposture. But the world continually produces weak persons and wicked persons, and as long as they continue to exist side by side, as they do in this our day, very debasing beliefs will also continue to infest ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... herself as a "psychic"; but otherwise she seemed oddly unpretentious and matter-of-fact; and Eugene had no doubt at all of her sincerity. He was sure that she was not an intentional fraud, and though he departed in a state of annoyance with himself, he came to the conclusion that if any credulity were played upon by Mrs. Horner's ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... constant wanderings of the persecuted sect of Cameronians, naturally led to their entertaining with peculiar credulity the belief that they were sometimes persecuted, not only by the wrath of men, but by the secret wiles and open terrors of Satan. In fact, a flood could not happen, a horse cast a shoe, or any other the most ordinary interruption thwart a minister's ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... face and pursuing trains of thought to unwelcome conclusions. He often took refuge from them in clouds of casuistry. The scepticism which was a marked feature of his intellect allied itself closely with credulity, for it was directed against reason itself; and though he has expressed in admirable language many true and beautiful thoughts, the glamour of his style too often concealed much weakness and uncertainty of judgment and ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... the early connexion between the Egyptians and Athenians, encouraged by the artful vanity of the one, was welcomed by the lively credulity of the other. Many ages after the reputed sway of the mythical Cecrops, it was fondly imagined that traces of their origin from the solemn Egypt [70] were yet visible among the graceful and versatile people, whose character was as various, yet as individualized, ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... eleventh century who compiled a historical work ([Greek: Synopsis historion]) the scope of which extended from the creation to 1057 A.D. He gives no evidence of historical knowledge or the critical sense, but rather of great credulity and a fondness for legends. His treatise is, moreover, largely plagiarized from the Annals of Ioannes ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... buildings of the old barracks and flooded the low ground about the sheds and stables. Drills for the infantry were necessarily suspended, several sentries, even, being taken off their posts. The men clustered in the squad-rooms and listened with more or less credulity to the theories and confirmatory statements of fact as related by the imaginative or loquacious of their number. The majority of the officers gathered under the flaring lamp-lights at the sutler's store ...
— Waring's Peril • Charles King
... the golden net upon the ground, and into it he threw a few grains of credulity, which his father had left him, and which he kept in his breast-pocket. They were like white puff-balls, and when you trod on them a brown dust flew out. Then he sat by to see what would happen. ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... arms, resembling, except the cross, those of the Moors, and by the great number of Amulets, (gris-gris of another kind) which they wear round their necks, and by which they seemed to wish to rival the infidels in credulity. There is then, in the South of Europe, as well as in the North of Africa, a class of men, who would found their authority, upon ignorance, and derive their authority ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... particular case. For though a certain neatness, or precision, carelessness, or other habit, may be discovered by handwriting, to describe from it all the minutiae of character is only feeding the love of the marvelous, so much on the increase in these days, when a reaction of credulity bids fair to make nothing too extravagant ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... answer those appeals it is impossible to conjecture. Common sense would say not one, but experience of what has been practised over and over again reminds us that the active parties on the present occasion are not calculating too largely upon the credulity of their countrymen. That the country will be a pandemonium long before any one can reach it from this side is hardly to be doubted, unless, indeed, the United States government shall have been able to establish a blockade ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... acquiescence; but to this sort of reproach I expect to be able to show that none are more obnoxious than those very philosophers by whom it is most freely cast. That nothing is more unphilosophical than uncompromising irreligion, nothing more credulous than its credulity, no other beliefs more monstrous than those by which it strives to fill up the void created by its own unbelief: this is my present thesis, and this I propound, not unaware what formidable antagonists I am thereby challenging, but not without something ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... him. In his obvious though silent suffering at the disgrace and dismissal of Cassio; in the dazed, forlorn agony that blended with his more active passion throughout the scene of Iago's wicked conquest of his credulity; in his occasional quick relapses into blind and sweet fidelity to the old belief in Desdemona; in his unquenchable tenderness for her, through the delirium and the sacrifice; and in the tone of soft, romantic ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... Rudyard Kipling, and Thompson Seton—had prepared the First Reader Class to accept garrulous and benevolent lions, cows, panthers, and elephants, and the exploring party's absolute credulity encouraged Isaac to higher and yet higher flights, until Becky was strengthened ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... been laughing at her last night? she asked herself indignantly; was that balcony scene a practical joke? He had been describing it to Lady Geraldine perhaps this afternoon, and the two had been laughing together at her credulity. She was in so bitter a mood just now that she was almost ready ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... vague fears and apprehensions. With his frequent and appalling losses of money, he had lost a measure of his faith in himself. His coolness of calculation had been diminished; he listened with readier credulity to rumors, and yielded more easily to the personal influences around him. Even the steady prosperity which attended his regular business became a factor in his growing incapacity for the affairs of the street. His reliance on his permanent sources of income made him ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... parts were nicely juxtaposed; The Lady of the Lake is an organism, and its several members partake of a common life. A few weaknesses may, it is true, be pointed out in it. The warning of Fitz-James by the mad woman's song makes too large a draft upon our romantic credulity. Her appearance is at once so accidental and so opportune that it resembles those supernatural interventions employed by ancient tragedy to cut the knot of a difficult situation, which have given rise to the phrase deus ex machina. The improbability of the episode ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... out on the porch and threw a kiss at Harriet. The act and its accompanying smile reminded Westerfelt of the deception the old lady had played on Bates, and that added weight to the vague convictions once more alive in his brain. Mrs. Floyd's smile implied a certain confidence in his credulity and pliability that was ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... ones is especially great; for where could any superstition find a more favorable soil than in this seat of philosophical half-culture, or over-culture; of the worship of Serapis, of astrology, of societies of Mystics, of visionaries and exorcisers, and of incredulity—the twin-sister of credulity. Be cautious then to hold back from baptism all those who regard it as a preserving charm or an act of good omen—remembering that the same water which, sprinkled on sanctified hearts, leads them to holy living, brings death to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... peasantry of Scotland, and which ascribes a miraculous power to the bonnet of the Wizard. It is curious to find the tale of the invulnerable cervilerium of the Italians, travelling on the breath of credulity and superstition into the "far north countrie" of which the Magician was a native, and only changed by tradition from the blue steel worked and welded by magic art, into the blue bonnet which was waited on ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 492 - Vol. 17, No. 492. Saturday, June 4, 1831 • Various
... into all seemly and generous arts and affairs—till which in some measure be compassed at mine own peril and cost, I refuse not to sustain this expectation from as many as are not loth to hazard so much credulity upon the best pledges that I can ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... had enjoyed the excitement when he and Madalena and their two assistants, among the other passengers on board ship, had consented to be searched for the missing jewels. And he had laughed sneeringly at the credulity of those who believed in Madalena's trumped-up vision "of the small fair man," the lighted life-preserver dropped into the sea at night, and the yacht which sent out a boat ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... on our credulity,' replied the girl; 'no living man can be a mummy,—outside of the House of ...
— HE • Andrew Lang
... seamen. Two or three asserted that they had witnessed an extraordinary sight during the night, but they all differed considerably in their accounts. It may be supposed that they were trying to practise on the credulity of a greenhorn. My belief is that they really fancied that they had ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... I knew that I at least was none such. I was no more prepared for so uncompromising a renunciation than any other weakling who seeks prestige by parade of exotic wisdom, and deems himself a seer if he can but name the Triad, or tell the avatars of Vishnu, I had not the credulity which may justify the honest renegade, and the western blood still ran too warmly in my veins. I felt that were I to stay in the East for fifty years, I should never reach the supreme heights of metaphysical abstraction whence men really appear as specks ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... take not advantage of my credulity, and these my weak moments: but were I the first lady in the land, instead of the poor abject Pamela, I would, I could tell you. But I can say ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson |
