"Negation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... attitude might be to our critics, to Christians the reform was positive. What was discarded was a limitation, a negation. The movement was essentially conservative, even actually reconstructive. For the language disused was a language inconsistent with the definitions of orthodoxy; it set bounds to the infinite, and by implication withdrew from the creative rule all such processes as could be brought within ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... came over the English Press, in which "the hereditary foe of small nationalities" was suddenly changed into "the champion of all honour, justice, and truth in the world"—which was particularly galling, if not actually ludicrous, to a race which was so obviously the negation of any such a claim—at least, so ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... his head—with him, a gesture that conveyed the full strength of negation. "We are on opposite sides of a line across which friendship is impossible. I could not be your friend without being false to myself. You couldn't be mine unless you were by some accident flung into the working class and forced to adopt it as your own. Even then you'd probably ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... JUSTICE of the Papal States. Alas! if in the preceding chapters on Trade we were discoursing on what does not exist, we are now emphatically to speak of what is but a shadow, a mockery. To say that in the Papal States Justice is not,—that it is a negation,—is only to state half the truth. Were that all, thankful indeed would the Romans be. But, alas! in the seat of Justice there sits a stern, irresponsible, lawless power, before which virtue is confounded and dumb, and wickedness ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... in the Imagination: Others are the names of the Imaginations themselves; that is to say, of those Ideas, or mentall Images we have of all things wee see, or remember: And others againe are names of Names; or of different sorts of Speech: As Universall, Plurall, Singular, Negation, True, False, Syllogisme, Interrogation, Promise, Covenant, are the names of certain Forms of Speech. Others serve to shew the Consequence, or Repugnance of one name to another; as when one saith, "A Man is a Body," hee intendeth that the name of Body is necessarily consequent ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... to which the ancient philosophers were subject, and against which Plato in his later dialogues seems to be struggling—the tendency to mere abstractions; not perceiving that pure abstraction is only negation, they thought that the greater the abstraction the greater the truth. Behind any pair of ideas a new idea which comprehended them—the (Greek), as it was technically termed—began at once to appear. ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... a fallacious one: it does not denote an existence, as Something does, but the end of an existence. It is in fact a negation, which must presuppose a matter once in being and possible to be denied; it is an abstraction, which cannot happen unless there be somewhat to be taken away; the idea of vacuity must be posterior to that of fullness; the idea of no tree ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... you with him. What future have you with him? You would go on down and down, as low as he should sink and lower. You've completely merged yourself in him—which might do very well if you were his wife and a good influence in his life or a mere negation like most wives. But in the circumstances it means ruin to you. ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... corporate wealth have themselves been responsible for a portion of the conditions against which Bryanism is in ignorant revolt. I do not believe that it is wise or safe for us as a party to take refuge in mere negation and to say that there are no evils to be corrected. It seems to me that our attitude should be one of correcting the evils and thereby showing that, whereas the Populists, Socialists, and others really do not correct the evils at all, or ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... which these rocks have been subjected at the time of their solidification, might have obliterated any remains of either plants or animals which were included in them. But this is only an hypothesis of negation; and it certainly seems very unlikely that a degree of heat sufficient to obliterate the remains of plants or animals when dead, would ever allow of their coming into ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... street of Mary of Burgundy, and went on his way out of the chiming city as its matin bells were rung, and took with him a certain regret, and the only innocent affection that had ever awakened in him; and thought of his self-negation with half admiration and half derision; and so drifted away into the whirlpool of his amorous, cynical, changeful, passionate, callous, many-colored life, and said to himself as he saw the last line of the low green plains shine against the sun, "She will marry Jeannot—of course, she will marry ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... the King," adequate as they may be, but, in addition, "Enoch Arden," "Ulysses," "The Vision of Sin," "The Palace of Art," "Maud," "Columbus," "Locksley Hall," "The Lotos-Eaters," and "In Memoriam," and all poems which, by negation or affirmation, may suggest or enforce a thought regarding the ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... manner in which people will discuss the gravest questions, such as God and the immortality of the soul. They gossip about them over their tea, write and read review articles about them, and seem to consider affirmation or negation of no more practical importance than the conformation of a beetle. With me the struggle to retain as much as I could of my creed was tremendous. The dissolution of Jesus into mythologic vapour was nothing less ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... and the friar, doffing cowl and gown, steps forward as a cavalier (an itinerant scholar in Goethe). He introduces himself as a part of the power that, always thinking evil, as persistently accomplishes good—the spirit of negation. The speech ("Son lo Spirito che nega sempre") is one of the striking numbers of Boito's score, and the grim humor of its "No! "seems to have inspired the similar effect in Falstaff's discourse on honor in Verdi's opera. The pair quickly come to an understanding ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... brazier the flame leaped high and subsided, and with it the cobra leaped and sank low upon its coils. From the people a mighty shout of negation went up, so that the walls rang with it, and the echoes were bandied back and forth, insensibly decreasing through many minutes. When all was still the Voice began to chant again, and the flames blazed higher and ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... insufficient; we must understand the confession in terms of all the factors that caused it. The process of discovering these factors is purely logical and generally established indirectly by means of an apagogue. This is essentially the proof by negation, but it may serve in connection with a disjunctive judgment which combines possible alternatives as a means of confirmation. We are, then, to bring together all conceivable motives and study the confession ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... hand in negation and indicated the wide lawn in front of the ruined buildings which sloped gently to the ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... The main thing to be said with regard to it, is that I had a secret from him. I believe he never suspected it, though of this I am not absolutely sure. If he did, the line he had taken, the line of absolute negation of the matter to himself, shows an immense effort of the will. I may tell my secret now, giving it for what it is worth, now that Mark Ambient has gone, that he has begun to be alluded to as one of the famous early dead, and that his wife does not survive him; now, too, ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... fine or imprisonment, at the discretion of said courts, all contempts of authority in any cause or hearing before the same." The only limitation placed on this power was that summary attachment was made a negation of all other modes of punishment. The abuse of this extensive power led, following the unsuccessful impeachment of Judge James H. Peck of the Federal District Court of Missouri, to the passage of the act of 1831 limiting the power ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... facts which are preserved for our use. Our method, notwithstanding, too frequently, is to rest the whole on conjecture; to impute every advantage of our nature to those arts which we ourselves possess; and to imagine, that a mere negation of all our virtues is a sufficient description of man in his original state. We are ourselves the supposed standards of politeness and civilization; and where our own features do not appear, we apprehend, that there ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... his wife. The fact that a coarseminded man found her lacking in attraction was simply another proof of her quality; yet the words sent a faint shiver through his heart. What if "niceness" carried to that supreme degree were only a negation, the curtain dropped before an emptiness? As he looked at May, returning flushed and calm from her final bull's-eye, he had the feeling that he had never yet lifted ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... means stupid,' returned Rudin, 'but he is on the wrong path. I don't know whether you will agree with me, Darya Mihailovna, but in negation—in complete and universal negation—there is no salvation to be found? Deny everything and you will easily pass for a man of ability; it's a well-known trick. Simple-hearted people are quite ready to conclude that you are worth more than what you deny. And that's ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... should not the believer always draw near to God in full confidence that he will do as he has said? He may remember that the prayer which has been manifestly answered was the offspring of deep humility, of conscious unworthiness, of utter self-negation, and of simple and earnest reliance on the promises of God through the mediation of Christ. Why should not his prayers be always of the same character? With the apostles of old he pours out his soul in the petition, "Lord, increase ...
— The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings With George Mueller • George Mueller
... sentimentalism is rank irreligion. I view the negro as a man permanently upon the rack, who is to be punished just as much as he will bear without diminishing his pecuniary value. And the allotted method of punishment is hard work, hard fare, the liberal use of the whip, and a general negation ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... certain. I conceive then infinity and perfection; that is not less certain; for I should not have the idea of a limit if I did not conceive of infinity, and the word imperfect would have no meaning for me, if I could not imagine perfection, of which imperfection is but the negation. Starting from this point, the philosopher proves by a series of reasonings that the conception of perfection by our minds demonstrates the real existence of that perfection: God is. He adds, that the existence of God is more certain than the most ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... the Talmud, and dealt with several Jewish Gnostics and Antignostics, as well as with the book of Jezira. Graetz assumes that the four main dogmatic points in the book Jezira, viz., the strict unity of the deity, and, at the same time, the negation of the demiurgic dualism, the creation out of nothing with the negation of matter, the systematic unity of the world and the balancing of opposites, were directed against prevailing ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... much attacked as involving an indefensible 'State absolutism', a denial of 'personality' to lesser groups, even as a negation of the right to lesser loyalties. Mr. Figgis, in a number of suggestive, if unconvincing, writings, has recalled the theories of the Jesuits and other anti-state minorities and protestants on this subject, ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... this frame of mind is incompatible with the temper needed for an era of moral fellowship such as Mr. Wilson was supposed to be intent on establishing. Consequently, a peace treaty unmodified by the principles underlying the Covenant is necessarily a negation of the main possibilities of a society of nations based upon right and a decisive argument against joining ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... know darkness, which is nothing real, only by denying, and consequently by conceiving daylight, which is most real, and most positive. In like manner we know the finite only by assigning it a bound, which is a mere negation of a greater extent; and consequently only the privation of the infinite. Now a man could never represent to himself the privation of the infinite, unless he conceived the infinite itself: just as he could not have a notion of sickness, ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... realize oneself and enter into the Higher Indifference. Beyond this, further meditation and fasting—by which was meant living solely on fish, fruit, wine, and meat—one presently attained to complete Swaraj or Control of Self, and might in time pass into the absolute Nirvana, or the Negation of Emptiness, the ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... matter, as some suppose, of impulse or intuition. In general, to be found, it must be elaborately sought and, although a positive merit of the highest class, demands in its attainment less of invention than negation. ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... qualification which every man who values truth must make when asserting such a negation,—viz., to the very best of my memory and belief,—I never set eyes on him nor heard of him until now, in the whole course of my life. Not a member of my family or of the legation has the faintest recollection of any such person. I am quite convinced that he never ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Wherefore set out one day To hunt for a wild Negation. They agreed to meet at a cool retreat On ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... and at the same instant the last ray from the false windows disappeared. Strain my eyes as I would, the sensitive retina remained absolutely unaffected; the darkness had finally come, and from one to another of that desolate company ran a little, tremulous sigh, then the silence of complete negation. ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... possessed by an exceeding desire not to be fined or imprisoned; if in that of the man who has smitten me on one cheek, I contemplate with satisfaction the absence of any worse result than the turning of the other cheek for like treatment. Strictly observed, the "golden rule" involves the negation of law by the refusal to put it in motion against law-breakers; and, as regards the external relations of a polity, it is the refusal to continue the struggle for existence. It can be obeyed, even partially, ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... Russian Legislature passed a law, by which Russians coming to Finland were to enjoy all the rights accruing to Finns without acquiring Finnish citizenship. A serious question of principle is involved in this new measure, since it amounts to the negation of a separate Finnish citizenship, which has hitherto been recognised by the Russian rulers even in their dealings with foreign powers. One of the obvious motives for this law is to make it possible to appoint Russian officials to Finnish posts. Several such appointments ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... aught in knowledge of Thibet in your Indian life? My life work lies there, and Hugh has sorely disappointed me. He was to send me books and maps and papers for my 'History of Thibet and the Wanderings of the Ten Tribes.'" With a confused negation the girl had fled away to the cheerless shelter of the great rooms whose drab and gray arrangements bespoke the Reformatory or a ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... this discovery, a revulsion carries their minds to the second position of which we spoke. This is, namely, the position of extreme denial. It is an attitude of negation toward revelation, such as prevailed in the barren and trivial rationalism of the end of the eighteenth century. The reason having been long repressed revenges itself, usurping everything. The explanation of the rise of positive religion and of the claim ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... is a hard saying for the Chinese, with their reverence for authority, and Wei Liao Tzu (quoted by Tu Mu) is moved to exclaim: "Weapons are baleful instruments, strife is antagonistic to virtue, a military commander is the negation of civil order!" The unpalatable fact remains, however, that even Imperial wishes must ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu
... of the angels, yet we have the habit of supposing that they sometimes look down upon us. It was thus, if the parallel is not exaggerated, that Arnold regarded the author of The Victim of Virtue. His attitude was quite taken before the orchestra ceased playing; it was made of negation rather than criticism, on the basis that he had no concern with, and no knowledge of, such things. Deliberately he gave his mind a surface which should shed promiscuous invitation, and folded his lips, as it were, against the rising of the ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... ALWAYS HARMFUL.—There is no period in life when constipation can be borne with impunity. Youth, with its virility and vitality, will endure its consequences with an apparent negation, so far as positive or specific results are concerned, but it is only an apparent impunity. There is always a certain amount of strength built up, held in reserve as a heritage of youth, which will withstand a certain amount of physical ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... to be dwelt upon with reference to the particular occasion, will be selected as the cause, even a negative condition (e.g. the sentinel's absence from his post, as the cause of a surprise), though from a mere negation no consequence can really proceed. On the other hand, the object which is popularly regarded as standing in the relation of patient, and as being the mere theatre of the effect, is never styled cause, being included in the phrase describing the effect, viz. as the object, of which the effect ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... force even to this flimsy conclusion might be given if nature could be said to be working towards a given end. But we do not find this. What we see is a multitude of forces at work, the action of each of which often results in the negation of the other. Put on one side the larger, but not the least pregnant fact that animal life is only maintained in the face of numerous agencies, inorganic and organic, that are apparently bent upon its destruction; put on one side ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... civilized mankind, by whom it is rightly regarded as a sort of moral leprosy. Whatever may be thought of the possibility of Sovietism in industry and government, Bolshevism, the spiritual dynamic as distinguished from the mechanical agent, is the negation of every virtuous principle which mankind holds in reverence. It frankly bases government upon brute force wielded by the few, and denies the ideal toward which all nations are striving, the ideal of government based upon the sanction of the governed. It unites in a terrible synthesis ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... automatic action can represent them, but their perfect reproduction can only take place on the basis of a liberty akin to that of the Originating Spirit itself, which therefore implies the liberty of negation as well ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... mere state of war, no doubt, predisposed many to assent to such theses who a few years before would have remembered that this was but the nominal position of the average protectionist of the three preceding generations. War being in itself the negation of Free Trade, the inevitable restrictions and the war temper alike prepared many to find reasons for continuing a restrictive policy when the war was over. When, therefore, the Committee of Lord Balfour of Burleigh published its report, suggesting ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... increasing elevation. A sandy plain never gives me a sense of real substance; it always seems as if it must be merely a covering for something,—a sheet thrown over the bed where a dead man is lying. And especially here did this broad, trackless, seemingly boundless desert face me with its blank negation, like the old obstinate "No" which Nature always returns at first to your eager questioning. It provoked me, this staring reticence of the scenery, and stimulated me to a sort of dogged exertion. I think I walked steadily for about three hours over the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... disadvantage in which he appears when placed beside the innocent cheerfulness of Shakespeare, and the frequent and generally not unjust blame which he drew upon himself by his manifold works of negation. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... reassure him, for the paintings he speaks of in glowing terms—notably "the full-length portrait of a young girl," which he overwhelms me by comparing to Velasquez, as well as the two life-size portraits in black, "in which there is an almost entire negation of colour" (though I, who am, he says, a colourist, did not know it)—are my latest ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... {Negation.} Negation in sentences is expressed by {ne} ({en, n}) before the verb, and {niht} after it: {[e:]r enist guot}, he is not good. {niht} is frequently omitted, especially after the preterite presents, the verbs {wellen}, {l[a]n}, sentences containing negative pronouns or adverbs, ...
— A Middle High German Primer - Third Edition • Joseph Wright
... except for the shuffling feet, the piano, an occasional phrase of encouragement from the instructor, himself gliding with a dab of fat in exaggerated ribbons, there wasn't a sound. To Lee it had the appearance of the negation of pleasure; it was, in its way, as bad as the determined dancing of adults; it had the look of a travesty of that. Helena conducted a restive partner, trying vainly to create the impression that he was leading, wherever she considered it advantageous for him to go. The thick flood of her gold ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... whole organization, and a just equilibrium of all faculties and functions is the condition of health. As in your Lilian the equilibrium is deranged by the over-indulgence of a spiritual mysticism which withdraws from the nutriment of duty the essential pabulum of sober sense, so in you the resolute negation of disciplined spiritual communion between Thought and Divinity robs imagination of its noblest and safest vent. Thus, from opposite extremes, you and your Lilian meet in the same region of mist and cloud, losing sight of each other and ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... as in time, which isolates huts, villages, races, no less than successive generations, involves the negation of culture; in its opposite, the intercourse of contemporaries and the interdependence of ancestors and successors, lies the possibility of development. The union of contemporaries secures the retention of culture, the linking of generations its unfolding. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... had not dared to go forward; from dread of pain, he had refused the opportunity of happiness. She knew now why he had never come to her, why he had let her slip from his grasp. All that was a part of his failure, of his distrust of life, of his profound negation ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... trouble in distinguishing the pupils of the teachers holding this view. They will be found to exhibit the most negative mental condition—a natural result of absorbing the constant suggestion of "nothingness"—the gospel of negation. In marked contrast to the mental condition of the students, however, will be observed the mental attitude of the teachers, who are almost uniformly examples of vital, positive, mental force, capable of hurling their teaching into the minds of the ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... have watched carefully the tendencies of these parties for many years must sometimes have grown despondent. The progressive school has claimed with unscientific haste the adoption, as a fundamental principle of Biblical interpretation, of the negation of the supernatural. Their argument is simply, that human experience disproves the supernatural. Man, a recent comer upon the globe, who has never kept a very accurate record of his experience, who comes forth from mystery for a few days of troubled ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... or analogy that presented itself. It was not even by negation that he thought. There was just one positive element that included all: time seemed to mean nothing, the ticks of the clock with the painted face were scarcely consecutive; it was all one, and distance was nothing, nor nearness—not even the nearness ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... the negative pole of Being—the very negation of Pure Spirit, and opposing it in every way. We shall see the part played by it in the astral colors as ...
— The Human Aura - Astral Colors and Thought Forms • Swami Panchadasi
... Government. "Nor," he continued, "ought the Government oL Portugal to stop here. It ought, as we have said, to go further; because from what his countrymen say of Livingstone—and to which he only answers by a mere vain negation,—from what he unhesitatingly declares of himself and his intentions, and from what must be known to the Government by private information from, their delegates, it is obvious that such men as Livingstone may become extremely prejudicial to the interests of Portugal, especially when resident ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... place, to see what reverence is. I say that reverence is no other than a confession of due submission by an evident sign; and, having seen this, it remains to distinguish between them. Irreverent expresses privation, not reverent expresses negation; and, therefore, irreverence is to disavow the due submission by a manifest sign. The want of reverence is to refuse submission as not due. A man can deny or refuse a thing in a double sense. In one way, the man can deny offending against the ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... commemoration of the new relationship she had gone to stay with Lady Considine. This had made me take everything else for granted, and the noisy American world had deafened my ears to possible contradictions. Her spectacles were at present a direct contradiction; they seemed a negation not only of new relationships but of every old one as well. I remember nevertheless that when after a moment she walked beside me on the grass I found myself nervously hoping she wouldn't as yet at any rate tell me anything very dreadful; so that to stave ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... ... my caprice, and for its being guaranteed to me when necessary. Suffering would be out of place in vaudevilles, for instance; I know that. In the "Palace of Crystal" it is unthinkable; suffering means doubt, negation, and what would be the good of a "palace of crystal" if there could be any doubt about it? And yet I think man will never renounce real suffering, that is, destruction and chaos. Why, suffering is the sole origin of consciousness. ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... lover—the terms changed with the seasons, last year "suitor" had been the common phrase—were occasionally swept in young company into a high irrational passion. Mostly, through skillful adult pressure or firm negation, such affairs came to nothing; but even these were sometimes overcome. And, when Linda had been disturbed by the echo of old days in her daughter's tones, she was considering exactly such ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... a Spanish schooner from Port Egmont, before the armament arrived, should be ordered to attend the house; and when this was negatived, he moved an address to his majesty, praying that the house might be acquainted at what time reparation was first demanded from Spain, which likewise received a negation. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... point, von Hartmann, who may fairly be called Schopenhauer's pupil, takes up the tale. He suggests that it is conceivable that a universal negation of the will may be obtained, if the preponderating part of the actual World-Will should come to be contained in the conscious minds that resolve to will no more. This he thinks may neutralize the whole, and put an end to existence, ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... wines of the human spirit, ought to be labour and gladness enough for the soul of a man. It is a poor substitute for food that helps us to forget the want of it. But how can we wonder when he would have no father, and claimed the black Negation, the grandmother of Chaos, as his mother! Yet was it the presence all the time of that father he refused that made it possible for him to drink the water of any poorest little well of salvation that sprang in the field of his life; and such a well ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... waved his hand in negation. Then his curly head fell, and he said sadly, but decisively: "I will stay here ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... and public opinion would be folly and sacrilege. Rome, merciful toward conquered nations, though binding them in chains, spared their lives; slaves are the most fertile source of her wealth; freedom of the nations would be the negation of her rights and the ruin of her finances. Rome, in fact, enveloped in the pleasures and gorged with the spoils of the universe, is kept alive by victory and government; her luxury and her pleasures are the price of her conquests: she can neither abdicate nor dispossess herself." Thus ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... because to a man who had nothing it sets at least a negative aim in life. Somewhat as prisoners beguile their days by taming a spider, the reformed drunkard makes an interest out of abstaining from intoxicating drinks, and may live for that negation. There is something, at least, not to be done each day; and a cold triumph awaits ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which all of us who profess the religion authoritatively taught in England hold ourselves, according to our faculties, bound to believe. The Catholics of Ireland (as I have said) have the whole of our positive religion: our difference is only a negation of certain tenets of theirs. If we strip ourselves of that part of Catholicism, we abjure Christianity. If we drive them from that holding, without engaging them in some other positive religion, (which you know by our qualifying ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... powers have been only so far manifested as to be believed in, not demonstrated. Everybody rates them highly, and thinks that whatever he chose to do would be done in a first-rate manner. Is it his love of disappointing complacent expectancy which has gone so far as to keep up this lamentable negation, and made him resolve not to write the comprehensive work which he would have written if nobody had expected ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... Doubt had begun to undermine the most confident, "Hush, not a word! it will kill me if you speak of it." ...Clerambault, full of pity, thought of Madame Mairet; he must hold his tongue in future;—but it was too late, they all knew now what he thought, and he was a living negation and remorse to them. Many hated him, but Clerambault no longer resented it; he was almost ready to help them ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... was received with a still and sober carriage: at last the King broke out into these words: 'We are informed that you have cheated us of certain lands in Middlesex'; whereunto, having received none other than a plain and humble negation, after some little time he replied, 'How was it then? Did we give these lands to you?' Whereunto Sir Edward answered, 'Yes, Sire, your majesty was pleased to do so.' Whereupon, having paused a little while, the King put on a milder countenance, and calling him to a cupboard conferred privately with ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... arithmetic, as with astronomy, they seemed not to have advanced greatly, if at all, upon the Egyptians. One field in which they stand out in startling pre-eminence is the field of astrology; but this, in the estimate of modern thought, is the very negation of science. Babylonia impressed her superstitions on the Western world, and when we consider the baleful influence of these superstitions, we may almost question whether we might not reverse Canon Rawlinson's estimate and say that perhaps ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... as well as ignorant harping! Why should we not change like everything else? In fiction, in poetry, in so much of both, French as well as English, and, I am told, in American art and literature, the shadow of death—call it what you will, despair, negation, indifference—is upon us. But what fools who talk thus! Why, amico mio, you know as well as I that death is life, just as our daily, our momentarily dying body is none the less alive and ever recruiting ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... are for the most part characterized by extreme stiffness, eccentricity, or ugliness. The requirements of construction and of human habitation cannot easily be met without sometimes using the forms which past experience has developed for the same ends; and the negation of precedent is not the surest path to beauty or even reasonableness of design. It is interesting to notice that in the intermediate field of furniture-design some of the best French productions ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... me, though with scorn She treats my adoration; I know she loves me, though my suit She checks with strong negation. ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... but a life. The soul is. Under all this running sea of circumstance, whose waters ebb and flow with perfect balance, lies the aboriginal abyss of real Being. Essence, or God, is not a relation or a part, but the whole. Being is the vast affirmative, excluding negation, self-balanced, and swallowing up all relations, parts and times within itself. Nature, truth, virtue, are the influx from thence. Vice is the absence or departure of the same. Nothing, Falsehood, may indeed stand as the great Night or shade on which as a background the living universe paints ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... properly employed a variety of phrases to bring his meaning more forcibly home, he will, I presume, allow that they are all equivalent; and that what he means by a necessary truth, would be sufficiently defined, a proposition the negation of which is not only false, but inconceivable. I am unable to find in any of Mr Whewell's expressions, turn them what way you will, a meaning beyond this, and I do not believe he would contend that they mean any ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... difference between two forms of government be not worth half a guinea, it is not easy to see how Whiggism can be viler than Toryism, or the Crown can have too little power." The answer is surely obvious. Whiggism is vile, according to the doctor's phrase, because Whiggism is a "negation of all principle;" it is in his view, not so much the preference of one form to another, as an attack upon the vital condition of all government. He called Burke a "bottomless Whig" in this sense, implying that Whiggism meant anarchy; and in the next generation ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... Browning has meant us from the first to see it struggling through them. But in so doing he has judged Sordello's poetic life as a blind aspiration after the spiritual, while the egotism which he represents as the keynote of his poetic being was in fact the negation of it. The idea was just: that the greatest poet must have in him the making of the largest man. His Sordello is imperial among men for the one moment in which his song is in sympathy with human life; and Mr. Browning would have made it more consistently so, had he worked ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... had been, of course, the negation of Bourbonism. He had led the Republican Party into new fields and set it to do new work, and far off, shining clearly, its goal beckoned it on. His followers were mostly young men; they saw that the world ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... movement of the soul can be contrary to the movement of anger, and nothing else than cessation from its movement is contrary thereto; thus the Philosopher says (Rhet. ii, 3) that "calm is contrary to anger," by opposition not of contrariety but of negation ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... the round and prosaic surface of the moon, and refusing to admit that there entered into its composition anything even of so low a vitality as green cheese—it was as though such an one had seen the affirmed negation suddenly take to itself life and form, and disclose from afar a whole heaven of thoughts, beauties, and aspirations which he had not believed existent. And then, having seen that gracious form so well defined that it must for ever remain imprinted upon ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... in my shoes—there's what I call a friendship beyond question. Well, my good fellow, if you should ever have need of discretion, understand that there are two sorts of discretion—the active and the negative. Negative discretion is that of fools who make use of silence, negation, an air of refusal, the discretion of locked doors—mere impotence! Active discretion proceeds by affirmation. Suppose at the club this evening I were to say: 'Upon my word of honor the golden-eyed was not worth all she cost me!' Everybody would ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... the backward progress of Ottoman domination, and have seen how, from the rough and ready methods of a military barbarism, the Turks evolved a more emphatic and a more highly organised negation of all those principles which we may sum up under the general term of civilisation. The comparatively humane neglect of the unfortunate alien peoples herded within the frontiers of earlier Sultans ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... the living undoubtedly presents many gaps and incoherences, and again it is not so mathematically one that it cannot allow each being to become individualized to a certain degree. But it forms a single whole, none the less; and we have to choose between the out-and-out negation of finality and the hypothesis which co-ordinates not only the parts of an organism with the organism itself, but also each living being with the collective whole of ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... Landa's ma, except that the circular wings contain the lines or strokes which the bishop has omitted, and which appear to indicate the m sound and are observed in the Imix symbol. Colonel Mallery, comparing this with the sign of negation made by the Indians and that of the Egyptians given by Champollion (our plate LXIV, 15), concludes that it is derived from the symmetrically extended arms with the hands curved slightly downward. This will furnish ...
— Day Symbols of the Maya Year • Cyrus Thomas
... or for not having made those pleasures which we have more exquisitely grateful. No one can be so foolish as to argue that the Deity is either limited in power, or deficient in goodness, because he has chosen to create some beings of a less perfect order than others. The mere negation in the creating of some, indeed of many, nay, of any conceivable number of desirable attributes, is therefore no proper evidence of evil design or of limited power in the Creator—it is no proof ...
— The Fallen Star; and, A Dissertation on the Origin of Evil • E. L. Bulwer; and, Lord Brougham
... and so transmissive that inanimate objects seemed endowed with two or three senses, if not five. There was no distinction between the near and the far, and an auditor felt close to everything within the horizon. The soundlessness impressed her as a positive entity rather than as the mere negation of noise. It was broken ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... is nothing in all that. Everything is good in God's eyes.' And this is the perpetual burden of his teaching. 'Satan's empire is the empire of nothing'; there is no such thing as evil—it is a mere 'negation.' And the 'moral virtues,' which attempt to discriminate between right and wrong, are the idlest of delusions; they are merely 'allegories and dissimulations,' they 'do not exist.' Such was one of the most fundamental of Blake's doctrines; but it requires only ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... not open that one yet, Wait until the sun is set. If you careless lift its latch Glimpse of nothing will you catch; Mere negation, blank of hue, Out of it will stare at you; Wait, I say, the coming night, Fittest time for second sight, Then the wide eyes of the mind See far down the Spirit's wind. You may have to strain and pull, ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... subjects, the tones were in every case those of the speaking voice, and intervals having a definite speech character were chosen. The fifth is the interval of the rising inflection of the question, the fourth is the interval of the rising inflection of indifference or negation, and the single falling slide used is a descending interval of a third or fourth at the close of the sentence. The fifth appears in the table as 5/, the fourth as 4/, and the single descending interval of finality as the period (.). Each verse was read on approximately ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... chisel? "It is not force of intellect," as George Eliot has said, "which causes ready repulsion from the aberration and eccentricities of greatness, any more than it is force of vision that causes the eye to explore the warts in a face bright with human expression; it is simply the negation of high sensibilities." ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... swift negation. "Little Willie don't want to tackle that delicate job. I'm subtle, but not so subtle as that. Alice Heath knows all we know and more, and you can bet they've talked ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... of affirmation and negation ran up and down the long table. Dan tapped with his knife again. "You hear me," he warned. "Thirty year I've been ridin' John Cardigan's log-carriages; thirty year I've been gettin' everythin' out of a log it's possible to ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... a hypocrite: "L'Univers, en declarant tous les jours qu'il ne veut pas d'autre liberte que la sienne, justifie tout ce que nos pires ennemis ont jamais dit sur la mauvaise foi et l'hypocrisie des polemistes chretiens." Lacordaire wrote to a hostile bishop: "L'Univers est a mes yeux la negation de tout esprit chretien et de tout bon sens humain. Ma consolation au milieu de si grandes miseres morales est de vivre solitaire, occupe d'une oeuvre que Dieu benit, et de protester par mon silence, et de temps en temps par ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... with it. Perhaps this mode is the best of the three. We will not say that it is not: it is at any rate preferable to the second. But once admit that philosophy is a legitimate occupation, and this mode must be set aside, for it is a negation of all philosophy. Every thing depends upon this admission. But the admission is, we conceive, a point which has been already, and long ago decided. Men must and will philosophise. That being the case, the only alternative left is, that we should discuss the highest problem of philosophy in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... and theological systems which it is destined to supersede. And yet it will be found that, in so far as it differs at all from the Inductive Science of Bacon, it is purely negative, since its chief characteristic is the negation of all Theology, and the entire exclusion from the domain of human knowledge, of Causes, whether efficient or final. It adds nothing to the sum of human thought which might not be reached by Bacon's method; it only subtracts whatever ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... bowed down before them. A tragic war ensued between "fathers and children," [1] a war of annihilation, for the belligerent parties were extreme obscurantism and fanaticism, on the one hand, and the negation of all historic forms of Judaism, both religious and national, ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... both novels we shall certainly be puzzled in that case to say what on earth a novel is. But the note of our age, both for good and evil, is a highly poetical and largely illogical faith in liberty. Liberty is not a negation or a piece of nonsense, as the cheap reactionaries say; it is a belief in variety and growth. But it is a purely poetic and even a merely romantic belief. The nineteenth century was an age of romance as certainly as the Middle Ages was an age of reason. Mediaevals liked to have everything ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... strive for political power rather than for the religious welfare of their denomination. In alliance with them are the powerful Jewish financiers who also control the press in Vienna and Budapest. Clearly Austria is the very negation of democracy. It stands for reaction, autocracy, falsehood and hypocrisy, and it is therefore no exaggeration to say that nobody professing democratic views can reasonably plead for the preservation of this system of ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... once terminated, the proletariat had been bled, supposedly as a measure of hygiene. The bourgeoisie, reassured, strutted about in good humor, thanks to its wealth and the contagion of its stupidity. The result of its accession to power had been the destruction of all intelligence, the negation of all honesty, the death of all art, and, in fact, the debased artists had fallen on their knees, and they eagerly kissed the dirty feet of the eminent jobbers and low satraps whose ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... (for I must expand it a little, here)—that his words, "because you did not apply them," contained the gist of the whole matter;—that the application of them, or any other things, was precisely the essence of design; the non- application, or wrong application, the negation of design: that his use of the poor materials was in this case admirable; and that if he could explain to me, in clear words, the principles on which he had so used them, he would be doing a very great service to all ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... national custom to act such a series of dramatic histories in orderly succession, in the yearly Christmas holidays, and could not but tend to counteract that mock cosmopolitism, which under a positive term really implies nothing but a negation of, or indifference to, the particular love of our country. By its nationality must every nation retain its independence;—I mean a nationality quoad the nation. Better thus;—nationality in each individual, quoad his country, is equal to the sense of individuality quoad himself; but ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge |
