"Free-thinking" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... however, disturbing Roderick, who quietly pursued his conjuring exhibition. When he had finished, he walked with the others into the garden, and said, 'I do it only to strengthen the fellows in their faith: for these puzzles give a hard blow to their groomships' free-thinking inclinations, and help to ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... modern acceptation of evolution, and natural selection was the key-note of the origin of species, natural selection may be called Darwinism with both historical and scientific accuracy; and in this sense of the term Huxley was a Darwinian; a convinced but free-thinking and broad-minded Darwinian, who was far from persuaded that his tenet had a monopoly of truth, and who delighted in shewing the distinctions between what seemed to him probable and what was proved, and in absorbing from other doctrines whatever ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... the world of thought. Having set right the health of the British Army, she would now do the same good service for the religious convictions of mankind. She had long noticed—with regret—the growing tendency towards free-thinking among artisans. With regret, but not altogether with surprise, the current teaching of Christianity was sadly to seek; nay, Christianity itself was not without its defects. She would rectify these ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... which would captivate her nobler sons, and draw them to her shrine; not to speak of her indulgence to young travellers, whom she accompanies as Minerva did Telemachus. But of all her bastard virtues, her FREE-THINKING, the virtue which she anxiously propagates amongst her followers in the Fourth Book, might, one would think, have been sufficient to have covered the poet from this censure. But had Mr Pope drawn her without the least disguise, it had not signified a rush. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... and daughter exchange glances, plainly saying, 'tis Sunday, and no using needle or knife that day. I understand them well enough, for I would have thought exactly the same myself in my childhood. So I try to find a way out by a little free-thinking: 'tis another matter when it's a machine that does the work; no more than when an innocent cart comes rumbling down the road, as it ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... at that time, and a very fine-looking man. He had entered upon the most unprofitable line of business that he could have chosen in the England of those days, the trade in philosophic free-thinking literature of the highest class. The number of buyers was, of course, exceedingly limited, both by the thoughtful character of the works published, and by the unpopularity of the opinions expressed in them. The marvel is that such a speciality in publishing could be made to support itself at all. ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... folk allow it? Do you want your children stuffed full of American ideas? What is in those books they are studying? You don't know? Neither do I. I would not look into one of them. But you ought to know that to learn English is to learn free-thinking. Do you know who print those books that your children are rubbing their noses in? Yankees! Oh, I doubt not they have been sharp enough to sprinkle a little of the stuff they call religion here and there in them; 'tis but the bait on the hook! But you silly 'Cadians think your ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... notion of a Deity or deities, whom it is necessary to propitiate in order to live well. Much time is of course required to elevate the multitude above all desire for a Religion,—but the seed has been sown, and the harvest will be reaped, and a glorious Era is fast approaching, when the free-thinking, free-speaking people of all nations shall govern themselves and rejoice in the grand and God-less Light ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... tenor of the orders of Christ: if only that the modern scientific Churchman may triumph more securely in the circumference of his heavenly vision, and accept more gratefully the glorious liberty of the free-thinking ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... with such as aggravate its improbability.[15] Had it been told of some distant country, at a remote period, we could not have told what peculiar circumstances there might have been to render probable what seems to us most strange; and yet in that case every philosophical sceptic, every free-thinking speculator, would instantly have rejected such a history, as utterly unworthy of credit. What, for instance, would the great Hume, or any of the philosophers of his school, have said, if they had found in the antique records of any ...
— Historic Doubts Relative To Napoleon Buonaparte • Richard Whately
... kept by Peter Annet (1693-1769), the last of the Deists who (in 1763) was imprisoned for a blasphemous libel. The elder Stephen was then living at Lambeth, and the choice of a schoolmaster seems to show that his opinions were of the free-thinking type. About 1767 the boy was sent to a school near his mother's family at Poole. There at the early age of ten he fell desperately in love with his schoolmaster's daughter, aged fifteen, and was hurt by the levity ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... boundless arbitrary power, in the Church dark intolerance." It must have been an easy matter to bring charges of revolutionary doctrines against the man who said so innocently, "But I,—I only wanted to train up free-thinking, independent men." ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... warning. Art so followed is the most servile indolence in which life can be wasted. There are then two dangerous extremes to be shunned,—forgetfulness of the Scripture, and scorn of the divine—slavery on the one hand, free-thinking on the other. The mean is nearly as difficult to determine or keep in art as in religion, but the great danger is on the side of superstition. He who walks humbly with Nature will seldom be in danger of losing sight of Art. He will commonly find in all that is truly great of man's works, ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... the increased controlled wet vote. Certain very numerous elements fear the increased Catholic vote and still others the increased Jewish vote. The Orthodox Protestant and Catholic fear the increased free-thinking vote and the free-thinkers are decidedly afraid of the increased church vote. Labor fears the increased influence of the capitalistic class, and capitalists, especially of the manufacturing group, are extremely disturbed ...
— Woman Suffrage By Federal Constitutional Amendment • Various
... the reasons that the world's people put forth. They interpret and explain away the commands of God, even those that are most explicit and imperative; they take them, leave them, or choose among them; the free-thinker subjects them to his lordly revision, and from free-thinking the distance is short ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... joyous man in the earth struck terror into the heart of the boy. From that time much of his life was controlled by his struggles with the fear of death, and his history is his reaction to that fear. At fourteen he astonished his free-thinking family by becoming a devout Christian, by praying, attending church regularly and by becoming so moral in his conduct as to warrant the belief that there was something wrong with him. Indeed, had a psychiatrist examined him ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... was a truly absolute despotism, such as the Papacy has never been, and the conduct of a sceptical emir in encouraging scientific inquiry goes but little way toward proving anything like a general prevalence of tolerance or of free-thinking. And this brings us to the second point,—that Mohammedan civilization was, on the whole, rather a skin-deep affair. It was superficial because of that extreme severance between government and people which has never existed in European nations within historic times, but which has always ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... in our houses and workshops; but their spiritual nature becomes, to the most, forever hidden. Philosophy complains that Custom has hoodwinked us, from the first; that we do everything by Custom, even Believe by it; that our very Axioms, let us boast of Free-thinking as we may, are oftenest simply such Beliefs as we have never heard questioned. Nay, what is Philosophy throughout but a continual battle against Custom; an ever-renewed effort to transcend the sphere of blind ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... of free-thinking speculators, who revolted against religious cosmogonies and superstitions. Sceptics concerning the knowledge that was the accepted monopoly of the priesthood must have existed in the oldest civilization we know anything ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... cherished by secular fanaticism to the injury of the Church. Because this is so evident, our critic holds, his novels are "found in the bosom of families in every corner of Spain." Their popularity among all classes in Catholic and prejudiced Spain, and not among free-thinking students merely, bears testimony to the fact that his aim and motive are understood and appreciated, although his stories ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... has been revived by M. Bourget in Le Disciple, and L'Etape. The Nemesis of Faith is as unwholesome as either of these books, and has not their literary charm. It had few friends, because it disgusted free-thinking Liberals as much as it scandalised orthodox Conservatives. If it were read at all nowadays, as it is not, it would be read for the early sketches of Newman and Carlyle, afterwards amplified in memorable pages which ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... socialistic principles into the army will not accomplish anything," Tolstoi continues. "The hypnotism of the army is so artfully applied that the most free-thinking and rational person will, so long as he is in the army, always do what is demanded of him. Thus there is no way out by means ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... age. The late Mr. Cumberland, in the romance entitled his "Life," gave this extraordinary fact, that Dr. Bentley, who so ably replied by his "Remarks," under the name of Phileleutherus Lipsiensis, to Collins's "Discourse on Free-thinking," when, many years after, he discovered him fallen into great distress, conceiving that by having ruined Collins's character as a writer for ever, he had been the occasion of his personal misery, he liberally contributed to his maintenance. In vain I mentioned ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Edition, p. 302, you say you neither have, nor ever have had, the means of going into the question of the miraculousness of the oil of St. Walburga. By good chance, there has arisen a contest not long ago between two papers, a catholic and a free-thinking one, about this very question, from which I collected materials. Afterwards I asked Professor Suttner, of Eichstaedt, if the defender of the miraculousness might be fully and in every point trusted, and I was answered he might, since he was nobody else but ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... and chased Dr. Mott from the lecture hall is not of much importance—students usually do behave in that way nowadays. A university of students all believers would be edifying if it were not amusing. The modern way to real belief and understanding lies through denial and agnosticism and free-thinking of all kinds, and Serbia is in a state of transit from peasant Christianity to modern positive Christianity. Her need is for well-guided transitional education. There is no bridge from the simple piety of the peasant to ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... chapter of the Corpus Juris would be found inscribed His Excellency's Magyar "indigenatus," etc., etc., Gyali began to feel exceedingly uncomfortable, and began to again change the course of the conversation. He chattered on about His Excellency being a fine, free-thinking man, related a hundred anecdotes about him, how he turned out the Jesuits from his possessions, what jokes he had played on the monks, how he persecuted the pietists, and other such things as might be very inconvenient incumbrances to the Principality of Hohenelm-Weitbreitstein,—in ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... found the city in a state of turmoil. The occasion was the march of the Catholic gymnastic associations from the church where they had heard the Mass to St. Peter's, where they were to be received by the Holy Father. Cries of "Long live free-thinking!" were issuing from the rabble which followed hooting in the wake of the procession. To these were retorted, "Viva il Papa Re!" Jose had been caught in the melee, and, but for the interference of the civil authorities, might have suffered bodily injury. ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... Galileo. Hariot, who numbered Bishops among his admirers, was accused by zealots of atheism, because his cosmogony was not orthodox. They discerned a judgment in his death in 1621 from cancer in the lip or nose. His ill repute for free-thinking was reflected on Ralegh who hired him to teach him mathematics, and engaged him in his colonizing projects. Ralegh introduced him to the Earl of Northumberland, who allowed him a liberal pension. But new ties did not weaken the old. Hariot and he remained ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... died in Paris, but his heart was always with the exiles of Israel. Mocker and ribald, he touches depths of sentimental tenderness sounded by none other. He fooled the philosophers, provoked the pious, and confused the minds of his free-thinking friends by outbursts of wilful reaction. He sticks the horns of satyrish "diablerie" on the lovely forehead of the most delicate romance; and he flings into his magical poems of love and the sea the naughty mud-pellets ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... grace, prolong'd his breath. Well might you think he spent his future years In pray'r, and fasting, and repentant tears. —But, O vain hope!—the truly Savage cries, "Priests, and their slavish doctrines, I despise. Shall I—— Who, by free-thinking to free action fir'd. In midnight brawls a deathless name acquir'd, Now stoop to learn of ecclesiastic men? No, arm'd with rhyme, at priests I'll take my aim. Though prudence bids me ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... self-denial, chastity. Paris applauded Alexander II., who massacred the Poles; Rome, on the other hand, did honor to a Polish bishop, Joseph Kunicievicz, who was cruelly murdered by Russian fanaticism. Paris celebrated the apotheosis of free-thinking and religious indifference; Rome, on the contrary, heaped honors on an Inquisitor, Peter d'Arbues, who suffered martyrdom. Paris was loud in her acclamations to the potentates and conquerors of the day, whilst Rome exalted an humble ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... Cheshire Cheese, telling them that Labour was the salt of the earth, and that Capital was the foe to Labour! Of course they loved him. The demagogue who is of all demagogues the most popular, is the demagogue who is a demagogue in opposition to his apparent nature. The radical Earl, the free-thinking parson, the squire who won't preserve, the tenant who defies his landlord, the capitalist with a theory for dividing profits, the Moggs who loves a strike,—these are the men whom the working men delight to follow. Ontario Moggs, ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... beginning to its end. Its end?—say, rather, its new dawn;—its fulfilment in a deeper, holier bond than is ever dreamed of by girlish sentiment or boyish passion—the still, sacred love of marriage. And, however your modern infidels may doubt, and your free-thinking heart-desecrators scoff, that is the true love—the tie which God created from the beginning, making man and woman to be one flesh, and pronouncing ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... and was expecting Luigi to decline, but he did not, because he knew that the Bible class and the Freethinkers met in the same room, and he wanted to treat his brother to the embarrassment of being caught in free-thinking company. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Pandoric box it was opening—nor did the Divines of the latter sect ever doubt the finality of their own doctrines. They wished to replace one infallibility by another. And the same charge can be substantiated against Deism. When in this Augustan age the Free-thinking leaders, fresh from the trammels of Christism, first took the name of Moral Philosophers, they little knew they were paving the way for an Atheism they so much dreaded—a democracy more unbridled than their most constitutional wishes—a political economy to be tried for half a century, ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... subjects them to the authority of systems in the universities, and deludes them with the names of party distinctions in the world,—all equally concurring to narrow the understanding, and establish slavery and error in literature, philosophy, and politics. The whole finished in modern free-thinking; the completion of whatever is vain, wrong, and destructive to the happiness of mankind, as it establishes self-love for the sole principle of ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... history of French Literature; but the reviews, critical notices, etc., to which Byron refers, were of a highly polemical and partisan character, and were the subject of attack on the part of Protestant and free-thinking antagonists. In a letter to Moore, dated Ravenna, June 22, 1821, Byron says, "Now, if we were but together a little to combine our Journal of Trevoux!" (Letters, 1901, v. 309). The use of the same illustration in letter and poem is ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... an old Fellow of Trinity, A Doctor well versed in divinity; But he took to free-thinking, And then to deep drinking, And so ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... of fact, I do! Didn't once! At college, you know; got into a free-thinking set, and chucked the whole thing aside. But I've been about a good bit. I've seen countries where they go on that tack and it doesn't pay. The old way is the best. I know I'm a bit careless still. Men ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... minds in contact with the ideas of their own times. For this was the age of Benthamism in social philosophy and "German neology" in biblical criticism. Though national education was in its infancy, a new desire for knowledge, and even a free-thinking spirit, was permeating the middle classes, and had gained a hold among the more intelligent of the artisans. The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, established by Brougham, circulated a mass of instructive ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... conditions, and therefore differently informed and endowed, had been stimulated and sharpened by mutual contact. In those regions where the commercial aristocracy of ancient Greece mingled with their eastern neighbours, the sciences were born, being nurtured and developed by free-thinking and courageous men. The state of things to be displaced may be gathered from a passage of Euripides quoted by Hume. 'There is nothing in the world; no glory, no prosperity. The gods toss all into confusion; mix everything with its reverse, that all of us, from ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... in history) voluntarily mounted the platform and introduced the Honourable Humphrey Crewe to the audience; not, to be sure, as the saviour of the State; and from that day onward Mr. Crewe did not lack for a sponsor. On the other hand, the sponsors became more pronounced, and at Harwich (a free-thinking district) a whole board of selectmen and five prominent citizens sat gravely beside the candidate in ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... abode the little town of Rheinsberg, where he could indulge, with a circle of congenial friends, in the studies and amusements to which he was partial. He grew up with a strong predilection for French literature, and for the French habits and fashions—free-thinking in religion included—which were now spreading over Europe. On his accession to the throne, Frederick broke up the Potsdam regiment of giants, and called back to Halle the philosopher Wolf, whom his father had banished. Frederick was ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... "that's no evidence. You may have dreamt it, that's all! And I tell you, you are lying, sir. You are lying and slandering from some spite against me, simply from pique, because I did not agree with your free-thinking, godless, ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... with a fly up its nose, which as a matter of fact, she doesn't at all. Alex sets her heart on Sam Thatcher, a Yale man who has turned against college and regimentation to set off for Russia with a free-thinking, free-living, rebellious companion oddly called "The Lippincott," who knows everything about women except how to get along without them. When Alex can't seem to get very far with the courtship by herself, her girl friends decide to take the ...
— Why the Chimes Rang: A Play in One Act • Elizabeth Apthorp McFadden
... to the police. They did not fight duels and would have thought a duel with a civilian like me an utterly unseemly procedure in any case—and they looked upon the duel altogether as something impossible, something free-thinking and French. But they were quite ready to bully, especially when they were ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky |
